The mechanic poked his head out from under the car to sing me the well-known song that it was a wreck and whoever was buying it was acquiring a problem.

I had decided to sell it, and who better than a mechanic to find me a buyer? They know everyone who’s in the market for a used automobile—people with the money, the desire, and no earthly way to get authorization to buy one new.

So I also sang him my well-known song, that selling the car was no big deal to me, that I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over whether it happened or not. I adopted the air of someone trying to shake off an object she really didn’t want to have around anymore, for whom economic need was a strictly secondary aspect.

The third act of this opera involved each of us trying to avoid falling into the trap of the other. So we came to a face-off in the neutral territory where there were no great obstacles to selling the car, and I was getting rid of it because I’d rather have the money than a Moskvich that made such exhausting demands.

“Do you want it fixed before you sell it, or would you rather get rid of it right away?”

Now the lyrics were growing more difficult. They required a mix of Muscovite auto mechanics and Swiss bank calculus. We grappled a bit and decided on rendering the car as attractive as possible with a minimum of expense. He told me he didn’t want any percentage of the sale, which implied that his profit was already built into the price of the absolutely necessary repairs, which meant that the minimum would be far from minimal. That’s how these things usually go.

The mechanic managed to get the Moskvich started and drove it up the ramp from the garage. He waved happily and took off into the distance as if the car had never belonged to me.

I said to myself, aloud, “Goodbye car.” I didn’t feel anything, other than a temptation to call Daniel to tell him about it. As if selling the car, something that for us here is a very serious operation with grave consequences, was important only in offering me a reason to get in touch with him.

Or try to get in touch. Because in fact I had already called him quite a few times since he had left my house.

At first I was afraid of giving myself away. As if the mere ring of the telephone would finger me as the caller, rather as I’d feel if discovered in act of picking someone’s pocket. However, caller ID is a very scarce service here, a completely unnecessary luxury, so one’s anonymity is almost always guaranteed. One of the advantages of underdevelopment: mystery.

Daniel had no answering machine. These too are not very abundant. Even if he did, I wouldn’t have been able to leave him a message, because then I’d have cast myself in the role of waiting for him to call me back.

So I was thankful that Daniel had no answering machine and that I could call him without giving myself away.

The first few times I hung up on the second ring. Later, more bravely, I let it ring longer, secure in being just one more caller.

The last few times, I let it keep ringing until the line automatically went dead. I sat there, listening to one ring-ring after another, while my heart beat with the hope that this monotonous and familiar sound would be interrupted by a voice. After a while I calmed down and just listened peacefully, convinced that this sound, which told me he wasn’t home, also contained some kind of sympathy for me.

I thought of using the most common ploy, most frequently in use among teenagers: that I wanted to “give him back his things.” But Daniel hadn’t left anything at my house. I didn’t realize that until I needed something return to him, and came up empty.

Or maybe not. There was The Arabian Nights.

Before taking it to him, I washed my hair and chose my outfit. I put myself together carefully, as if getting ready for a date. All to play a single card, which would get him to open a door and take the book, maybe thanking me and maybe not. Or maybe that would lead to something more.

I found his house, an apartment building from the 1930s that he had called “pure Havana art deco.” Through the grime, yes, the style could still be glimpsed. I knew he lived on the top floor. The stairway was more comfortable and better lit than I expected.

I knocked, praying that he’d be slow enough to give my expression of fear and anxiety a chance to slip away.

Nobody came. Having foreseen this possibility, I sat down on the steps. Having exams to grade, I spread out my professorial apparatus like one building barricades and digging trenches. Since it was the top floor, I wouldn’t be getting in anybody’s way. And I would be so lost in my task that his arrival would truly surprise me.

I couldn’t concentrate. Every sound of footsteps might be Daniel. People came in constantly. I counted the steps to keep track of which floor they reached, and each time someone kept climbing, the real possibility drove off my fright, leaving only anxiety and a desire to see him.

I remember him telling me that, although he lived alone, the apartment belonged to his grandmother. She hated him, and so as not to have deal with him, she spent almost all her time in the country at the house of a cousin whom Daniel had barely ever met but who spoiled the grandmother with the clear goal of inheriting her apartment when she died. The tactics of this distant cousin had been successful, the grandmother having made out a will in his favor. The cousin had already told the old lady that he would be moving in and fixing up the house, which implied dire consequences for Daniel’s abode and his freedom.

But neither of these relatives seemed to have taken possession of the apartment yet. Maybe it was all just another of Daniel’s stories, I thought, smiling without bitterness. I missed Daniel and his lies, and I’d come there in search of them.

Two hours later, I decided to station myself in the park across the street. An awful place, laid out atop the ruins of a building which, in the seventies, must have been architecturally sumptuous and economically vital. It had housed the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, an organization through which socialist countries provided each other with disinterested help, favoring the less developed like ourselves.

As a premonition, the construction began to show signs of trouble from the bottom up. The foundation was not well designed. The subsoil was not appropriate, so the plan for a magnificent pseudo-Corbusier edifice many stories high devolved into a gray and prefabricated cube of four stories, pockmarked with holes that never succeeded in looking like windows.

And later, not even that remained. The building was demolished, leaving behind an enormous empty lot, a plain on which to taste and swallow the dust of defeat.

The solution, eventually, was a park. Treeless, in a city where the sun is an almost punitive presence. With gray benches, poorly cast and scattered and isolated from each other, lampposts laid out in military style, and some sad shrubs, always recently planted, flanking a cement-tile walkway. As if the park had been constructed not only on top of, but out of the ruins of the headquarters of those Magi who had come, as usual, from the East.

The rest of the park was dry ground above which circulated the fumes from buses and cars passing on the avenues that framed it. These too were filled with dirty, severe gray buildings.

It was a sad redoubt, but it gave me a good view of the entranceway to Daniel’s building. I stopped grading tests so as not to let my eyes wander from the door.

Meanwhile I tried to picture what Daniel’s place must look like inside. I constructed my image out of what he had told me. I had no idea how much of that was real.

According to him, the apartment was devoid of any and all of the electrical appliances that are inevitable in modern domestic life. Just an electric fan, christened “Hurricane” for the strength of its beneficent breeze. Made from the motor of a Russian washing machine. Also, a black-and-white television that functioned only if you gave it the right sort of kick. Daniel called it “Justine” and said that, since he didn’t like mistreating it, he rarely turned it on.

“The best thing is about my house is, the power never goes out.” So he told me one day while we were gazing over the darkened city from my porch. “Blackouts just make me laugh. The good neighborhoods and the houses with VCRs, PlayStations, DVDs, cordless phones, and microwaves go without power. Meanwhile, I’ve got plenty of kilowatts and no appliances the invest them in.”

According to Daniel, the walls of his apartment were colored somewhere between green and gray, and the ceiling had been white many years before. The windows were beige, with French louvered panes grown dusty and squeaky and not closing very well. In the bathroom, the constant flow of water that couldn’t be shut off had worn away the enamel of sink, tub, and toilet. The bathroom opened into two bedrooms furnished with old frames, battered mattresses, and very used sheets.

The floors were of gray tiles. Dull, scratched, and very seldom cleaned. In spite of the rooms being small, the lack of furniture made them feel bare.

The kitchen was tiny, everything in it proclaiming the flight of both food and inhabitants. The counter was broken, and the sink dripped. The 1950s Westinghouse refrigerator was almost always empty and in need of defrosting.

The only luxury was the computer, a present from Adrián. Though not the most modern, it was fine for writing on.

I placed Daniel in every room. Curiously, I didn’t imagine anyone else with him. There was no need. It hurt me enough to imagine him carrying out innocent activities without me. I was jealous of the rusted surface of the bathroom mirror, of the back of the chair on which he tossed his jumbled clothes. Jealous of the space and time in which he moved. Jealous that he hadn’t left me for another woman, but rather for himself.

I watched the people walking by. For mid-morning on a workday, there were many. Under an intensely bright blue sky, they performed a sort of choreography of idleness. People in no hurry to get anywhere, proponents of the here and now.

When the sun got too hot to bear, I couldn’t lie in wait any more. With The Arabian Nights still in my bag, I joined the slow-moving crowd. I wished I could have been that peddler, pedaling my way home.

MY ANSWERING MACHINE WAS no longer just an appliance. It had become an ally whom I placed in charge of Daniel’s re­appearance, so that I would not be condemned to wait anxiously in the house.

Sometimes I wandered aimlessly, dawdling more than I planned, confiding in the machine to reach an understanding with Daniel, as if it were a complicit mother who knew how to manage such matters for her daughter’s benefit. Sometimes, while I went walking to delay my return home, I would have an attack of sudden joy because I knew the answering machine was there, watching over my relationship, ready to take the call I expected any minute.

When I did come home, I would restrain myself from rushing to the bedroom corner that my imagination had converted to the apse of a cathedral, the space that held the black box full of messages that always included Daniel’s.

Instead, quelling my hurry, I would turn toward the bathroom, because the first thing one does on coming in from the street is to wash one’s hands and face. I would look at myself in the mirror and confirm that, in those minutes “before,” my face took on a very peculiar expression.

Then I would walk to to the kitchen and drink some water, as one also does on coming home after so much sun on the street and so few beverages available to slake one’s thirst. I would not be able to avoid wondering what I’d make for dinner if Daniel were coming that night.

Sometimes I even managed to get myself out on the balcony to take a look at the city Daniel wanted to leave, with which I had signed a nonaggression pact and a tacit understanding too.

But normally, after my glass of water and the fantasy of a supper for two, I went to my corner and pressed the button. Always with cold hands and shaky legs.

The few moments that followed, those voices speaking in series, became the compass needle of my days, the indicator of my emotional state. Lorena’s energetic calls ceased to have any importance, as did P.T.’s calm and collected voice, Sergio’s sweetness, calls from the department to inform me of meetings or schedules, and Marcos’s announcement of his departure for London that very night.

This last one, I thought with some irony, meant that Marcos had decided that my having a new lover was not sufficient reason for him to leave without calling, but it did excuse him from paying a farewell visit. I didn’t stop to think about the years we’d shared or how different our lives would be from now on. Even within the limited square kilometers of our city and island, they were already different enough. What I did feel was that his message usurped the space of the other man whom I needed. And that Marcos, as usual, went about his business and accomplished what he wanted, while I was the loser he expected me to be. I went on listening to messages, always awaiting the next.

After these sessions of listening, I would cry—sometimes sadly and serenely, sometime with anger not yet used up. Sometimes, out of pure desperation, I nearly screamed.

To try to live at peace with myself, to avoid feeling guilty of having let the best thing in my life slip away, I moved on from guilt to seeing myself as the victim of a bad throw of fate’s dice. I felt very sorry for myself then.

But at other times, I played tricks. I told myself Daniel had called but didn’t want to talk to the answering machine. So I spent the rest of the day expectantly, imagining him behind every click when some caller, on hearing the recorded greeting, hung up without a word.

At night I would hug the pillow fiercely and try to forget I had a body. I didn’t want to remember what it had experienced, but I remembered nonetheless. I refused to pay it solitary homage, which would be too painful. I cried a lot, slept badly. I considered sleeping pills, wine, infusions, good movies, and bad books, all of which can put one to sleep.

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING the breakup, my friends paraded through my house. But nobody could help me evoke him. They didn’t know him, and I had no memories to share with them. I cried in Sergio’s arms, cried with P.T. holding my hand, cried with Lorena looking me straight in the face. I became a pathetic character from a soap opera, jilted episode after episode, the crybaby of the series. I told myself the same things time and time again, and wondered whether I should wait for him.

Lorena told me what she thought. “Since you don’t have anything better to do, you might as well wait for him. You’re going to wait for him no matter what, and how long that lasts depends on how long you delay meeting someone else, given that you’re the type who clings to the past.” That observation referred to Marcos, whom Lorena could never let pass an opportunity to mention. “I’m sure you’ll weave and unweave the same shroud for quite a while.”

I’M NOT GOING TO a psychologist to talk about being “lovesick,” I said to myself one day, when I was giving myself a series of orders before undertaking another twenty-four hours of waiting.

I’m not going to end up at a psychiatrist with manic-depressive bipolar disorder, I went on.

I’m not going to take sleeping pills, anti-anxiety pills, or antidepressants.

I’m not joining the cult of herbs, aromatherapy, and homeopathy.

I’m not requesting sick leave because my soul aches and I can’t work.

I’m not giving up bathing and eating.

I’m not taking to drink.

I’m not taking up cigarettes.

I’m not going to drag myself around the street.

I’m not wearing the expression of a foolish abandoned woman.

OLGA SMILED AT ME, and I felt like crying on her shoulder or between her commodious breasts. I wanted her to stroke me and coddle me.

Since our conversation about the job of department head, she hadn’t asked me anything more. She figured me for the sort that has to think everything through slowly, but I was ready with an answer now.

“I think I can do it, at least till you get back. You have to explain it all very well and give me the contact info for everyone I’ll have to deal with,” I told her, scared half to death but wanting to give it a try.

“It’ll go fine, sweetie, everybody will love you. I’ll give you all the instructions and I’ll make sure you know how to find me, too. You’ll see how well it will go. Just like your presentation of Daniel Arco.”

I didn’t cry into Olga’s soft shoulder nor between her commodious breasts. I didn’t tell her anything. We went into the meeting where she announced that I’d be the new department head for a time. I was glad to have made friends with the secretary, to a degree, since secretaries are the key people in these situations. Everyone else looked at me and applauded, making their calculations about whether I’d be a timorous substitute or a tyrannical control freak.

I got home and reviewed the latest events. Within just a few weeks, Marcos had left, I had broken up with Daniel, and I’d become temporary department head. I washed my hands and drank some water while I thought that over and listened to the calls.

The mechanic had finished the repairs and had made appointments with possible buyers. He wanted to know whether he was authorized to negotiate on the price in case someone asked for a discount.

Lorena invited me to a party to celebrate her anniversary and an offer of an exhibition in Mexico City, at the national university. “I don’t want to hear any excuses or to have to come drag you over here,” her speech ended. Sergio announced he was coming over for us to talk. “I love you and I want you to be okay, Marian,” he whispered at the end.

Marcos’s mother threatened to come over someday to have another coffee with me. Probably she wanted to bring me up to date on Marcos’s string of successes in London, I thought.

The telephone rang. I was sure it would be Daniel.

“He’s gone, Marian,” Adrián began. “I just got back from the airport. God knows how much I tried to get him to tell you himself, but he wouldn’t give in. He kissed me, for the first time, before he went through security. But though I dreamed of a kiss many times, I know it wasn’t for me. So I have something that belongs to you. I’m not the ideal person to ask you to forgive him. But I dare do that and more, because what I want to say to you is that you should wait for him. Or we’ll both wait for him, if you’d like to see me sometime. . . .”

Adrián was talking to the machine, which I figured was easier for him. I interrupted.

“Thank you Adrián. We’ll talk later,” I said.

I felt that sorrow was a disease with clinical symptoms, a very strong pain in the esophagus, a shrinking in, becoming less, freezing up. A fear. For oneself, at one’s own brink.

ABSENCE

I had already experienced a sense of loss. My mother had died. All the time she was ill, I knew that her disease was not a steep stairway toward cure but a painful corridor toward death, yet still something inside me never accepted that. I could not get myself to believe that one day she would be no more. I lived each day like an exhausted soldier in an isolated trench, having lost all sense of time.

When she died, I still didn’t understand, even though I took her hand and watched her go. Nor at the funeral, surrounded by people who sympathized with me; nor at the cemetery, keeping her company all the way to the place she’d never leave.

In the days following her death I felt liberated, weightlessly sad and strange. Everyone was surprised by my readiness to change things in her room, to get rid of her clothes and medicines and the objects that had been the props and scenery of her illness. I was a daughter who handled her sadness very well, knowing she had done everything in her power to care for her mother. And this daughter, proud of her good heart, had no guilty conscience and could allow herself to seek out a path toward happiness.

Then one day I realized that my mother had died and left me alone. I collapsed. I begin to pretend she was there in the kitchen to hear my remarks. I began to dream of her every night and evoke her in every drifting cloud or accustomed sound. I tried to do penance for the sin of having forgotten that she could die. I wallowed in the punishment of missing her, denying myself pleasures and the chance to get control of myself as everyone advised. My mother deserved all this. Trying to be happy felt to me like a betrayal.

Daniel got me to renounce this vow of sorrow. I forgot about suffering for my mother in return for all she had sacrificed for me. I was happy and passionate, I fought to keep him, I felt manipulated and jealous. I allowed myself earthly feelings, far removed from sacred duties. With his tricks and laughter, Daniel offered me a hand and pulled me back to the real world.

His departure did not send me back to the realm of mourning and the dead. Instead, his loss became my real loss. It taught me that my mother’s absence was permanent and irremediable, while this new one involved something that that made it even harder to bear. Waiting.

WAITING

Depression is the frustration that follows anxiety. The lack of courage to accept unmet desires and unanswered prayers. Anxiety is waiting, uncertainty. Depression is when D-Day comes but the Allies do not land. Waiting comes to an end, replaced by certainty in the form of a No, a guarantee that everything will continue just as our anxiety had led us to fear. Depression signifies that anxiety has not been relieved.

There is a solution. Stop waiting. Don’t dream, don’t fantasize. Enjoy the peace of our daily routine, the air that yields us oxygen, the water that slakes our thirst. Close the doors on Peter Pan’s island and Alice’s gardens. Forget the ray of light, close the door, darken the windows, and banish all thought of annunciations.

As a sadistic practice, I went to the Malecón for a form of shock therapy. I wanted the sea to be sad, I wanted rain, I wanted the streets to miss him. Nothing of the sort. The waters seemed those of some clean, transparent shore, the clouds broke apart joyously in the blue, playing their games with a sun that radiated pride in the light that lit up the sky.

I sat on the wall, looking out at the mare nostrum. I remembered Daniel saying that the waves of the Malecón were also the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, never mentioning the Caribbean Sea. He liked to think we were part of something bigger.

You’ve been my storyteller, and I’ve been your attentive listener. My storyteller, juggler, bard, griot. My Scheherazade who makes every night into a starry sky and the bed into a magic carpet. Streetwise liar, trickster, survivor. Full of life, and too good to last. All this I confessed to a Daniel made of untiring, unceasing waves.

“Are you Spanish?” an older woman asked me, giving me a curious look. I shook my head no, not wanting to talk. I was sad and didn’t want to emerge from my sadness.

“French?”

I shook my head again, surprised by her persistence in assigning me other nationalities.

“So you’re Cuban?” she continued.

This time I nodded tiredly. I told her yes and started to get up.

“But from Havana or Miami?”

“What do you want?” I asked, finally curious.

“I have a serving set made of Sèvres porcelain. I’m looking for someone to sell it to.” She seemed happy that I had answered, and embarrassed that she’d interrupted me.

I reached into my purse and found my antique dealer’s card.

She looked at me as if she couldn’t believe it. Eyes riveted on the card, she offered her thanks.

I decided to go home. When I walked in, I neither washed my hands nor took a drink of water. I sat down to write the scene that had just passed on the Malecón. Bonjour Tristesse. The first vignette.

“THE JOURNEY OF THOSE who leave only begins with that flight to Europe. That’s the beginning, Marian, that idea of leaving this island, seeing the rest of the world, which although it is something that some Cubans do, practically none of us plan on it.” So P.T. began his lecture the day he came to collect Lorena’s paintings, though I suspected that his visit was as much about therapy, the service friends are always willing to offer.

“People are so eager to travel that they worry about what will go wrong. Flights delayed, questions posed by officials in the airport before stamping the exit permit. The journey before the journey is so exhausting, you end up worrying you won’t be able to go after all.

“Then, on the airplane, the ‘rest of the world’ from which you feel so isolated begins. You don’t know how to buckle your seatbelt, you’re intimidated by the stewardess, you don’t know which things she offers are free and which you have to pay for. And once you land, there on the other side, you can spend a long time learning about insurance, or how to use an ATM machine.

“You’re dazzled by the well-dressed women, the men in suits and ties heading out with their briefcases every morning. You eat everything you’ve dreamed about, in the quantities you’ve dreamed of too.

“But the rest of the world lives real life too. You start looking for a job. You get to know the city inside out, but it still feels strange and you haven’t made any friends. You start remembering, and the memories pen you in and suck you dry. You realize how beautiful your country and your people are. You start worshipping an ideal Havana that lives in your heart, while you resign yourself to living outside it.”

“Or you don’t need that. Daniel doesn’t fit into that picture of crushing nostalgia,” I said.

“Those who have gone need us more than we need them,” he answered. “Our needs can be taken care of with a few dollars. What they need can’t be stuffed into a handful of letters.

“Finally, one day comes the long-awaited first visit back,” P.T. went on, like a visionary in a trance. “You’re here, but you’re not from here. You find Havana as foreign as Jakarta. You think you want to go home. But wasn’t this your home? You don’t belong anywhere anymore. In the airport they don’t ask you so many questions. But you ask yourself questions, and the answers take a long time and lots of tears.”

“I can’t imagine Daniel pining for the life he had here.”

“That life was made up of you, his friend, a Havana full of books, time to write, and his skills as a happy vagabond. Believe me, wherever he is now he doesn’t have much time for Whitman or Lorca. When two Cubans meet up outside of Cuba, the first thing they ask each other is, ‘How long have you been here?’”

“Sounds like a conversation between prisoners.”

P.T. nodded and got up to leave.

“Don’t miss the party. Lorena won’t forgive you.”

“Don’t worry, I’m coming.”

Daniel is in the Prado, looking at Las Meninas and discovering in the original painting something he’s never seen before. His eyes are tearing up before such grandeur. Or he’s in the Alhambra by night, seeing his reflection in the fountain in the Court of the Lions, surrounded by genies and princesses. I’m here, imagining him. Torn between all my good wishes for him and a hope that things won’t go so well for him there without me. These were my thoughts as I watched P.T. leave my building with the rolled-up canvases under his arm, accompanied by the violet light of dusk.

IT’S SEVEN A.M. THE bus stop is packed. People hold onto the habit of trying to get to work whether the Ministry of Transport cooperates or not. There’s a small man. He’s got a boy’s build and a dreamy look on his face. He’s one of those people who are only slightly Downs, who make you think their only problem is an excess of goodness and faith. He’s waiting for the bus, keeping tight hold of a folder full of papers. He got here before anyone else. He’s the first in line, at the head of a queue that, with the wait, has gotten wider than it is long. He’s never learned how to board a seven a.m. bus. The rest know how. The bus chugs off, leaving him staring at the passengers, all those who had gotten on ahead of him, who left him outside. His expression clears, he straightens up, holding tight to his folder. Once again, he’s first in line, waiting for the next bus. Behind him, a new line gets wider and more disorderly as the wait goes on. Bonjour Tristesse.

MARCOS’S MOTHER GAVE ME an ostentatious kiss and came in, feigning embarrassment so as to make me feel uncomfortable and, therefore, very friendly.

I did as expected, asking after Marcos.

“Marian, my dear, the truth is that I’m so happy I wanted to come tell you right away because I know you’ll be happy too. Marcos is coming back to Havana.”

“Really??” My surprise was not put on, much to her delight.

“They’ve offered him a management job here. In a joint venture with a Canadian firm that has branches all over the world.”

I’ve never been envious. But I wondered, honestly, who was tossing the dice up there in such a way that some people always came out so much on top, while others were always left out.

“Marcos is very intelligent,” she declared with a smile. “Why should he play second fiddle in a foreign country when he can contribute so much to his own?”

I marveled at the way Marcos’s mother could identify what would be good for her son with what would be good for the nation.

“I’d be so happy if you two got back together. You were always my favorite. I’m among those who believe in ‘birds of a feather, flock together.’”

I agreed, smiling. In situations like this, I’ve always been her favorite, because I’ve always sat still for her broadsides.

“But, from what I’ve been hearing, you’ve got someone else. Are things working out okay with him?”

“Yes, quite well.”

“I’m so glad to hear that, Marian. Is he a professor at the university?”

“He’s a writer.”

“Writers always have their heads in the clouds. You need somebody more practical, a man you can rely on. Life in Cuba demands someone who’s always on his toes. But Marcos will always be your friend, you know that, don’t you? He loves you, I mean, we both do. You know you can always count on us. “

“Yes, I know, thank you. And you can count on me.”

“Now, dear, with this post Marcos will be taking up, they’ll be checking into his social and political qualifications, to make sure of his appropriateness and reliability. They have to be sure he won’t betray the country’s interests. So, I gave your contact information, as someone who could serve as a reference. I hope that’s not a bother.”

Finally. I thought she’d never get to the purpose of her visit. I’m an honest citizen and I fulfill my civic duties and I’m a university professor, an acting department head. I look upstanding, discreet, and friendly. Perfect for making a good impression on those who would be checking up on her son.

“Don’t worry. You did the right thing. I’ll be happy to help Marcos out.”

“And he feels the same. He already told me he’s dying to see you. That wouldn’t create any problem for you, would it?”

“Of course not. He can come here whenever he wants.”

“Thank you, my dear. You’re as lovely as ever. You know I want the best for you, though I’d have preferred for you to stay with us. Well, God disposes.”

She gave me a kiss on each cheek, Spanish style. She shook her head to ruffle the perfect curls that framed her eternally triumphant face. Was a mother like this a requirement for things to go well in one’s life, I wondered as I watched her descend the steps as if walking down the broad stairs of the Houses of Parliament.

THE TWO WOMEN BEHAVE like actresses in a spicy play, taking offense with nearly sensual anger, expressed through obscene gestures and curse words. They are old, strong, and lively.

It seems like a settling of scores, a trial carried out on the street. One shouts at the other, “Bitch, robber, you took what belongs to me.”

People stop in their tracks, no one in this city is in such a hurry that they’ll miss a good fight. The crowd swirls around them. Two actresses in an amphitheater, a Havana stage.

It could be a fight over a man, as in tragedies and comedies, operas and operettas, vaudeville and daily life.

One of them decides to exit the stage. She casts a mocking glance at the crowd and asks them to make room. A passage opens and she, the thief of the farce, proudly walks off.

The other, the one robbed, pursues her—first with taunts and then hurrying her steps to catch up. They start fighting, grabbing each other by the hair.

The spectators do what they always do in such cases—divide themselves arithmetically into equal groups to grab hold of the contestants and separate them.

Finally, the source of the dispute, up to then unknown, enters the scene. Making itself known, taking center stage as in the soliloquy of the last act, a yellow umbrella appears. Everyone laughs. Some clap. As in a morality play, the virtuous win and the guilty are punished. The umbrella’s legitimate owner recovers possession, straightens her clothes and her hair, and acknowledges the public with a flirtatious bow. She opens her yellow umbrella and, in a circle of yellow light, departs.

The show is over and the group disperses. Everyone goes back to what they were doing a few minutes before, heading where they were heading while discussing what they’ve just seen. Just like a cultured audience on its way out of the theater.

“I’VE NEVER GONE TO bed with anyone who hasn’t been able to pay. ‘Yours for richer or for poorer’ isn’t in my vocabulary.”

Adrián and I were in an Italian-style paladar on the top floor of a Central Havana apartment building. The private restaurant had four tables, occupied mostly by foreigners.

The waiters and some customers were acquainted with Adrián. We sat down at the only empty table. Adrián pulled out my chair and opened the curtains of a picture window. All we could see was sea and sky, as if we were in the dining room of a cruise ship in a film.

I don’t know real Italian food, just the pizza, lasagna, cannelloni and spaghetti that populated the self-service pizzerias that satisfied our adolescent hunger in the seventies and eighties, one on every corner, with names like Vita Nuova, Buona Sera, and Cinecittà.

Or those with greater pretensions, tablecloths, waiters, and some delicacies: La Romanita, Montecatini, Castel Nuovo. Those had risotto and tiramisu as well.

But parmigiano reggiano, carpaccio, and torta della nonna had never appeared on any menu I had seen.

I read the menu, which was endless. I looked at the prices and opted for the cheapest, a Margherita, but Adrián smiled and said no. He spread the menu before me while covering the prices with his hand. He warned me that I could not choose a Margherita.

Adrián was behaving like the shy rich man, or a famous one who was trying to stay out of the limelight without giving offense, in a spot where everyone was intent on greeting and smiling at him.

He must have come here often with Daniel, they must have hatched plans and laughed like boys, telling beautiful and horrible things and promising what we’ve all promised someone, sometime.

“I don’t know what to choose. Could you recommend something for me?”

Adrián requested a tasting sample of the whole menu, so as to teach me the basics. He assured me I would like it all.

“This way, the next time you come, you know what you want. The cook is a Cuban who lived in Rome for a long time and worked in a trattoria. He really learned his stuff.”

“And then he came back,” I put in.

I knew that everything I said had a second meaning. My unconscious betrayed my obsession with linking everything to Daniel.

“Yes. On one of his vacations in Havana he met the owner of this apartment. For a number of years they just saw each other during vacations, till they opened this restaurant, which now is quite well known. As you can see, it’s got a group of steady customers, all the ones I said hello to.”

“Haven’t you ever thought about leaving? With all your contacts, it would be easy, I think.”

“I don’t know anyone abroad well enough to leave the place where I feel secure and control my own life. I don’t want to be in some other city where I’m somebody’s prisoner and spend the day shut up in an apartment watching cable TV and eating popcorn, without documents or friends. I’ll wait till Daniel becomes famous to do my sightseeing in the rest of the world.”

“But you could find a job.”

“I have a job, Marian. For years I’ve been coming home in the mornings after working all night, with pouches under my eyes that feel like they’re drooping to my knees, but money in my pocket every time. That money takes care of all my tastes, from buying expensive perfumes to giving old editions of books to my friends and their girlfriends.”

There was no boastfulness in that, more a sense of pride in having fulfilled some promise he made to himself.

I wanted to ask whether he had ever been in love, but I didn’t think his telling me about his work gave me the right to pry into his emotional life.

“I’m friendly toward them,” he went on. “I put up with their neuroses, depressions, anxieties, and obsessions. I’m happy when good things happen to them. I cheer them up over the bad things. And I charge.”

“Like a psychoanalyst,” I joked.

We had progressed to dessert. Adrián said that to finish off we would have a liqueur, Amaretto or Limoncetto “. . . etto, etto,” he laughed.

Daniel, just look what you’re missing, I thought over and over. The two people who love you the best, seated at a window filled with the sea.

“Look, here’s a guide to Madrid I requested for you.” He handed me a book with a photo of La Cibeles on the front. “I leafed through it already, I was curious. You’ll be able to imagine Daniel, where he is.”

Daniel came into our conversation along with the liqueurs. This also brought the moment when I could ask.

“You’ve heard from him, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” The statement ended there. Adrián didn’t feel that my question required a longer answer.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know, Marian. The sound was bad and he was nervous, he wanted to tell me things and listen at the same time. It was raining and there was static. It was hard.”

“Did he ask about me?”

“Yes. I told him you were fine, that you knew he had gone, and that I was sure I’d see you.”

“He didn’t give you any message?”

Adrián weighed his desire to soothe me against his friendship for Daniel. His desire to give me some good news that afternoon and his vow of silence. Finally he found a phrase to offer me.

“He says that the bananas there are more expensive and not as good.”

MADRID WAS BUILT BY Philip II in the center of Spain. It’s far from the sea, and the river that flows through it is insignificant.

Everyone descended from Spaniards needs to visit the city. A hundred and ten years ago, we were Spaniards too.

Like a calendar, Madrid has four seasons. At least since Franco’s time, however, it doesn’t get a snowfall worthy of the name. The summer heat is dry and exhausting. Everyone escapes from the city, which becomes populated by flocks of Germans and Scandinavians carrying little bottles of water. In the fall it rains a lot, people walk hurriedly underneath their umbrellas, and since the city is always under reconstruction, the streets become mired in a mix of rain and cement.

Since it’s true that a hundred and ten years ago we were Spaniards too, we go there. Perhaps to seek in the past some present-day help in building our future.

Then we discover that the habit of colonizing and catechizing is still going strong. No one gives you a decent job. If you’re a woman and you stand still for two minutes in the street, someone will offer to pay you to suck him off in the Casa de Campo. If you want to make friends, your options are the Chinese who are always working, the Moroccans who hang out on the corner, or Bulgarians who won’t speak with anyone.

Madrid is always in a hurry. The best place to find a smile and a bit of space is in the lowest class of bars, where, drunk as everyone is, you might be mistaken for one of the princesses of the realm.

Madrid is a city where you expect good things to happen to you because a hundred and ten years ago we were all Spaniards. But that’s not enough.

Madrid is full of ladies with square-heeled shoes and hairdos out of Tootsie, carrying shopping bags from El Corte Inglés and gossiping on and on. Police who graduated from Francoist schools and rich kids who go to great lengths to appear American. People who were once taught in school that a hundred and ten years ago we were all Spaniards, but have now forgotten that completely.

MADRID IS AN ISLAND, surrounded by a warm sea that sometimes, in the morning, rises into the streets and bathes the feet of pedestrians in the froth of little waves.

The center of Madrid is a canal that empties into the sea. In the canal are gondolas, canoes, and sailboats. Travelers eat the plentiful salmon, herring, sardines, and shellfish whose colors and shapes come from the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch.

Many bridges cross the canal. Of wood and marble, full of statues, lampposts, arches, and free shops that distribute happiness, health, success.

There are wide boulevards, monumental plazas, bohemian hideaways, labyrinthine alleys, sumptuous buildings, and skyscrapers ranging from baroque to modernist to futuristic. In all of them, the windows are full of flowers.

A thousand languages are spoken in Madrid, where any tongue is understood. A smile is the Esperanto of the city. The people are variegated and dress in different colors. There are rainbows though it doesn’t rain, there are Northern Lights and nights clothed in white. At sunset, the bells of the churches, mosques, and temples all ring, and the people kneel down in the sand to pray to the God of their neighbors, asking for the neighbors to be blessed.

The people drink in bars, in gardens, in pubs, in bistros, at kiosks. In the street, the subway, the banks, on the grass. In offices, in the parliament, in cathedrals. In the woods, parks, and plazas.

And they dance. It’s always Carnaval in Madrid. People undulate and sway with their faces masked. The street people are costumed as bankers, the illegal immigrants as senators, the soldiers as hippies. The line of dancers moves in a great wave of pleasure, infinite and inexhaustible, toward heaven as painted by Velázquez.

I didn’t open Adrián’s guidebook to Madrid and to Daniel. I set it down next to the telephone, in that corner of the New World.

THIS TIME THERE WERE no surprises. Sadness has that advantage, it holds still. I got dressed for Lorena’s party in full knowledge that this time Daniel would not appear. I wouldn’t be waiting for him, his absence would not make me anxious, we wouldn’t fight and he wouldn’t tell me any lies. We wouldn’t make love.

It was a hot night so I decided to walk along the Malecón. But there wasn’t any breeze, not even by the sea.

Lorena’s house is large and solid, built at the turn of the twentieth century. One of those with decorative grates around the windows and columns at the entranceway. Lorena was born there and won’t hear a word about moving. She dreams of her sons marrying good women, of the sort who no longer exist, and founding families who will live happily in those same hallways, treading the antique tiled floors and brushing against the discolored walls.

For the party, she had pulled the electric fans out of all the bedrooms and scattered them around so they disheveled everyone’s hair and added some ventilation to that of the windows opened to the warm, humid night.

The house was packed. Lorena knows how to mix colors, flavors, and people.

We gave each other massive hugs. I told her, without words, all that was happening to me, and she listened to the words I didn’t say. We went into the kitchen, where she told me her news.

“I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to travel, not for three days and not to stay. I don’t have time, and I don’t have interest.”

Lorena talked a blue streak. She was making one of her famous rice dishes and she circulated among pots, spices, and the most diverse ingredients, leftovers from previous meals that were resting in the expectation of being blended and ennobled in whatever invention would feed the many guests.

“Lorena, I don’t get it, what nonsense is this? Everyone wants to travel, it’s a normal desire, and especially here. Why are you passing up this opportunity? It will be good for you, from any point of view. They’ll pay your expenses, Mexico is a quick flight, you’ll be able to speak your own language and after a few days’ break from routine you’ll come home and something in you will have changed.”

“I don’t want anything in me to change, Marian. I don’t want my kids to miss me, or for P.T. to have to take over chores that we generally split half and half. And there’s everything that comes before the trip: paperwork, red tape, visa, exit permit, tickets, packing, money, getting the house ready for me to go. Then the trip: get up, smile, marvel, answer the same question a thousand times, walk, get tired out, sleep badly, eat weird things, and so on, until I board another plane which will bring me back to the place that I left a mess, where now I’ll be wiped out, used up, and directionless.”

“What about if everything goes very well, the arrangements turn out to be simple, you like Mexico, you make friends, they like your work, you find opportunities, and you come home full of stories to tell?” I proposed this other version without understanding what Lorena was driving at.

“I’ve thought about that too. In that case, my life will have turned to muck. Everybody here is more or less okay till they catch that first goddamn plane. Then wherever they go, any shithole of the earth, game over. Suddenly they’re in crisis, overheated, and they can never live normally here again. They lose all ability to talk about anything else, they think travel is the only virtue that can do anything for them or that they respect in anyone else. All they do is think about the next trip. Instead of taking care of the present they spend their energy inventing a future that’s about another seat in another airplane to go to some other shithole of the earth. All their minutes, days, hours, thoughts, and actions are devoted to this. No. However it turns out, I’d be fucked.”

Lorena, blanketed in her apron and wielding an enormous ladle, stirred the kettle forcefully. Like a witch out of the Brothers Grimm.

“After the famous first voyage, I won’t be an artist any more, just an anxious pre-traveler. I won’t be able to concentrate on what I’m doing because all my neurons will be at the service of the famous second voyage, and then the third. No thanks. Leave me here in my corner. I don’t want any surprises. I prefer to imagine that some things are still where they ought to be. I don’t think everyone needs to travel. I think there are some people who can’t be bothered with leaving their house.”

“Fine. Then get yourself an agent who will handle your works and show them abroad. You’ll be a mysterious Cuban artist who doesn’t want to set foot outside Cuba. As a publicity stunt, that’s not bad.”

“No. An agent is someone who tells you to paint something different from what you want. I don’t want to get mixed up with them. Look, somebody who likes their job doesn’t neglect it for a hobby. Someone who loves their partner doesn’t go looking for an affair. Someone who feels good in one place doesn’t go sniffing out someplace else.”

“Lorena, so many people in the world travel, and nobody comes to these conclusions. Traveling is good, it confers some humility as an antidote to the egocentrism we suffer on this island, it teaches you there are many ways to do things, that the world is big and different. You can’t deny yourself a chance to see other lives, other cities.”

“Marian, there are people who simply fuse with the landscape that belongs to them. People who inhabit the scenes that tourists take a glance at, and who give them the advice they need. People who show up in the photos of others, and come to be part of the description of this place or that. I’m that kind of people. I don’t want to be a baffled tourist, making empty pilgrimages with a pocket guidebook, a digital camera, and a lot of hurry.”

“What does P.T. say? He was happy about your trip.”

“P.T. was happy about waving goodbye and about welcoming me back, you know his obsession with borders. He’s told me travel stories from Sinbad to Conrad, but none of that convinces me. My two previous husbands left. I’m not leaving my kids even for a jaunt to Varadero. I’m not going to be an intermittent wife. What matters is being together in good times and in bad.”

We laughed a lot over this, as we put the finishing touches on a rice plate full of surprises. Lorena is way too atheistic to be citing matrimonial sacraments. She believes in things that find their way into her head, as long as they don’t come from any religion. She says anybody who’s on the right side of God doesn’t need to be making dates with him in any church.

We changed the topic. Lorena was my friend who didn’t want to leave, and I was happy with that. Who wanted to be here always. By choice, not by inexorability.

I took the same route home as I had when coming to the party, but now the breeze had risen and the residents of Havana were rushing to take up their positions on the seawall. I like this city, I wanted to say out loud. To Daniel.

There are days I haven’t been waiting for you. Days when I’ve gone out and noticed how the sun and the sea don’t need you, nor the city either; how thousands of oblivious pedestrians make their way through it, immersed in their daily travails and accomplishments, unaware that you exist and their lives not at all reduced by this lack. But then, when I notice that forgetting you for a few hours has been my only accomplishment for the day, I rebel against the idea of such a sacrifice. I’ll remember you tomorrow, I vow when I switch off the bedside light at the conclusion of a TV movie that ends with corpses on both sides.

Sergio said it was normal for me to be sad and anxious, to cry and sleep badly. He took these for signs of life. Of life and of love, and to him love is always good, even in its downsides. But when I asked him about the future, what he thought would happen, he had no answer, which meant that anything was possible. I might decide to go to Madrid. Daniel might come back. We might forget each other.

“Don’t try to rush things or force them,” he advised me. “Don’t hurry them up. Enjoy the role of chance. It’s the best-organized thing there is.”

I SHOULD RENT OUT one of the bedrooms, I said to myself while seated in the living room, totaling up how many square meters I owned. As Daniel had advised me, and as he had assured me I would never do. You’re not cut out to survive in this city, Marian, were his words that I remembered. But maybe I was. I’d found a good reason to try.

If I rented, Daniel could come back and we could live here in some security, without persistent worries, and we’d even be able to buy ourselves some small treats. He would devote his time to writing, not taking on other jobs to pay the rent or the heating bill of his hypothetical European house. I would read his work and give him advice that he would decide wasn’t worth taking. We’d be happy with every book he published, each one better than the one before.

I sat in my fragment of the city, fondling each of these dreams as if I were a milkmaid in fairy tale. And I tried to assess the potential value of the building where I’ve lived since I was born.

The building was dirty. Someone had thrown up on the stairway, presumably someone who’d gotten drunk in the nightclub in the basement. Once upon a time we’d entertained ourselves circulating petitions to have the club closed and turned into a library or sex education center or a place for floral therapy, but it seemed that the best therapy and most effective form of culture was dancing. Anyway, the vomit was just a temporary detail on top of the permanent debris, the cigarette butts, candy wrappers, dirt, mud, and shoe tracks.

I don’t know how many people have been hired to clean the building over the years. Always too old to climb eight stories with a bucket and mop in hand. Sooner or later they quit, and then sooner or later another old woman appears, another who’s trying to get by on a small pension and doesn’t want to depend on her kids. Or her kids don’t want her to depend on them.

And since we’re in the Third World already, we can’t import people to do the jobs we don’t like. We’ve got thought patterns of the First World and an economy of the Third. We used to import people from other provinces who would do the work Havanans scorned, but now immigration from the provinces is controlled. Havana is overcrowded. It seems we have no room even for those of us already here.

So, the building stays dirty. Someday soon, we’ll all resign ourselves to cleaning the hallways and the stairs and so we’ll get the place clean. And then it will get dirty again, and so on and on until another old woman arrives with bucket and mop.

The cleaning issue shouldn’t be an obstacle to my renting out my mother’s room, I thought. I could clean my flight of the public stairs, too.

The next issue was the neighbors. If I were to decide to rent without a license, I’d have to depend on their complicity. I took a quick inventory of those who lived above, below, and across from me—with whom I can never seem to agree. Maybe that’s just because they’re my neighbors. I imagined a building full of friends, but I wasn’t sure that our harmony and friendship would last very long if we were in such close quarters.

On the second floor there was a large family in which, until recently, nobody worked. They were all sick, on leave without pay, or in between jobs. They spent their time shopping or hanging out, going to physical therapy or standing in lines. They were supported by regular remittances from a distant cousin who’d been living in Miami for many years. They celebrated Christmas with turkey and turrones, and they ordered even their aspirin from Miami, since they were sure that everything from there must be better. They were always up on the latest fashions and knew every discotheque and boutique.

Then the Miami cousin decided to come spend a Christmas with her loving and dependent relatives. For the first few days, it seemed normal to her that no one got up before ten a.m., after which all were content to go shopping and eat out. It was Christmas, after all. But then the holiday passed and the relatives’ schedules did not change. Puzzled, she asked when vacation ended, which uncorked a litany of orthopedic issues, psychological ailments, problematic bosses, pursuit of better jobs, and, at last, the happy assurance that all this was possible because she was supporting them.

The cousin then explained the source of the money that allowed them such uninterrupted leisure. In the early mornings she cleaned a building, then she took care of an old woman until eight at night, and on the weekends she cleaned private homes. This vacation was her first in six years. She didn’t think she could afford another for quite a while.

So the juicy remittances came to an end. The cousin was not hard-hearted enough to turn off the spigot completely, but the family had to cut back their spending, and a few of them even found work.

After visits to Vienna and Berlin, solo organ performances in Gothic cathedrals as a self-styled messenger from the angels, the musician on the third floor set off for far eastern Cuba in search of mystical experiences like those of the Beatles in India. Two months later, he came back with a dancer of native origin. That was how we discovered there were still a few communities remaining in Cuba that lived in stilt houses, ate casabe made from yucca flour, and danced the areítos of old.

We all attended their wedding service in the nearby church, desirous as we were of seeing this girl who had stepped out of a Gauguin painting draped in a white gown full of ruffles and ribbons, down the back and shoulders of which poured a shining cascade of blue-black hair. She gazed upon the unmoving saints and listened to the sacramental recitations with a smile that might have been innocence or might have been craftiness, it was hard to say.

A few weeks later, her relatives began to arrive, but they had trouble adjusting. Instead of taking advantage of the much-touted virtues of the capital, they longed for places where they could see the sun and swim in a river worth the name. They wanted to eat healthy things that were not manufactured in unknown places, and they were tired of being put on edge by the harsh noises emitted by doorbell, telephone, television, and stereo.

Nonetheless, they spent hours listening to the musician, sitting like statues as he poured out minuets and preludes by Bach. Finally, they nodded in approbation and continued in their silence. But little by little they began trickling back to their village, and they spoke of taking the girl with them, as the musician glumly confided in me.

The dancer’s family found everything very aggressive, but each day it grows harder to evade the neuroses of modernity. I don’t know how long their oasis of peace will last. The suppliers of false comforts, of fast cars and cell phones with camera and vibrator, the eternal manufacturers of anything and everything are committed to evangelizing all of the poor souls who lack computers or DVDs.

My closest neighbor is the hero. His name is in the history books and his house is full of commendations and historic photos in black-and-white or sepia. He’s an authentic hero. He doesn’t talk about the feats he supposes we have all read about. The hero’s first wife was his hometown sweetheart, the one who feared for his life, waited for him while he was in prison, hid his incriminating documents, and gave him children. She took care of the house so he could make Revolution in his position as a hero with heavy responsibilities.

The hero’s second wife was his secretary, somewhat younger and very enthusiastic. An emancipated woman, she smoked cigarettes and imprisoned her attractive rear end in very tight pants. She grew to know so much about the hero’s life as to constitute his memory. She stayed up late at night typing and writing letters, slept on the sofa in the office because with only a few hours’ break there was no point in going home. She converted the hero’s office into a home so welcoming that the hero stopped going to his own house or talking to his wife.

The hero’s third and current wife is very young. She hasn’t done anything for the hero, whom she met while researching historical events in old magazines for a paper she was writing in her first year of college. One day this brave and sweet gentleman gave her a lift to class, and she ended up attached to him. In spite of what one might expect, she has been very faithful. Instead of making the old hero ridiculous by clothing him in the attire of a young person determined to keep up with the times, she has begun to dress like an older woman. She gathers her hair into a severe bun, wears strings of small pearls, and dresses in ageless outfits. She speaks slowly and walks at his pace. The joke among the neighbors is that the hero will have a fourth wife soon, because this one has grown too old for him.

The hero’s wife’s best friend is the very old woman on the fifth floor. In 1961, she met Jackie Onassis while her name was still Kennedy. They shared a meal in La Côte Basque, where she got a waiter to take a snapshot. When she returned to Havana a few years later, she began to live off the photo and the memory, and by now she’s milked them all for every dried-up drop. She’s served as consultant for research on the Missile Crisis, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, Manhattan tourist guides, and biographies of Truman Capote. She’s more of a fixture on TV than the guy who does the weather forecast. She travels a lot, is interviewed constantly, gives lectures on the Kennedys, the sixties, New York architecture, Woodstock, and the short story as practiced in the United States. She even has a website and a fan club. The first thing you see on walking into her apartment is her smiling face—ever more faded and blurry—alongside the lovely ex-first-lady in the photo that changed her life.

In the penthouse live the “gusanos” who never managed to leave. Since 1959 they’ve been declaring that their family stays out of politics, and they’ve been very consistent about isolating themselves from everything that’s gone on. They remember the names of every brand of American breakfast cereal that used to be in the store. But, curiously, none of them has left the country. They don’t have any relatives in the U.S. to request their visas, and they have no opportunities to go abroad on work duties and not come back.

Instead they’ve become patriots of another age, worshipping the Constitution of 1940 and Estrada Palma’s administration of 1902. They’re very proper, and they maintain a home in the style of the fifties, so visiting them is a kind of trip into the Twilight Zone. Everyone says they’re super boring but unfailingly polite. They still open the elevator door for you and help you with your heavy things. Completely démodé.

And on the first floor live the girls. They frequent the gym by day and the discos by night, not going anywhere except by car. Nocturnal animals who sleep till noon and always emerge with smiles and shining hair.

I decided I had nothing to fear from any of the neighbors. None of them would inform on me just because a few days a month a stranger, carrying a bottle of water and burned red by our tropic sun, might venture in and out of my house muttering in bad Spanish and smiling at all the world. I told myself I would give it some thought.

I READ THE LATEST vignette, just finished, aloud. I wondered whether I’d been able to tell what I’d seen, and whether readers would feel what I had tried to describe.

My relationship to Literature has always been that of a bookworm. I taught myself to read with a bit of help from my mother, who then began offering me books. They became my best friends, always at hand to give me a boost, asking nothing except my time and my desire to devote it to them. For me, books have provoked more emotions and sensations than real life. And they’ve always accompanied it.

I chose to savor and pick apart what others wrote. I majored in Language and Literature, almost unable to believe that I could get a university degree for doing my most favorite thing.

After graduation I stayed on inside the same buildings and classrooms, repeating the things I had repeated to myself as an undergraduate. Now aloud, from the lectern and writing on the chalkboard, for my students.

To keep up the spirits of my dying mother, I pretended to be writing a book. The book became more pressing than the disease, more soothing than the medications, more agreeable than reality. We got a lot of enjoyment out of a novel of which I never even wrote the first word.

Before Daniel came into my life, The Eskimo preceded him. I read his words without having seen his face. My first sense of his voice was from writing, not speech. I met him through his book, and Literature was the cause of our first argument. The argument that led to us reconciling as friends and then turned us into lovers.

His idea about our writing a book together was our last mirage, our last plan without departures or separations. A plan that envisioned us together, doing many things.

Now, writing my part of Bonjour Tristesse was like dancing a pas de deux without a partenaire, like conversing solo or masturbating without fantasies. Like living without Daniel.

I’M WALKING BEHIND TWO brothers. They’re old men, and one of them is retarded. It’s apparent that the other has taken care of him since they were children. That he has devoted his life to this task. That they have no resources and don’t know anyone. That this is no trick, that they are poor and honest. The older brother carries an ancient briefcase that seems to be his treasure. He guides the younger brother. It’s always been that way. They’ve never asked God for an explanation.

Every smile of the child-brother provides an answer from the father-brother. They do not think about accomplishments, ambitions, or crowning projects. They move serenely though the streets that make up their little planet, thankful for things we are unable to taste.

FOR ME, LITERATURE WAS a bridge on which I walked alongside and toward my loved ones. But it didn’t prove solid enough. My mother died despite her enthusiasm for the novel I invented for her. Daniel left in spite of his book and the one we were going to write together.

I tried to turn Literature into my tangled path toward happiness, a charm that would ward off departures and solitude, because in and of itself it was no longer enough to buffer me.

Thus I asked from it the three gifts that we hope our fairy godmothers will provide, the three wishes of folk tales and of life, the sound track of every toast at every holiday ritual, but no less heartfelt for their repetition: health, wealth, and love.

But Literature granted me none of these. My mother died. My salary is laughable in today’s Havana. Daniel left me to go make Literature somewhere else.

On my computer screen, I reread all the vignettes, from the first one up to the words composed only a few minutes ago. I placed the cursor on the final period and held down the backspace key. Like an open mouth snaking backward, nothingness devoured each letter and space, leaving phrases half-completed and then continuing to gobble them until they disappeared. Every word became a senseless monosyllable and then nothing at all, until finally the cursor reached the first capital letter I had typed on the first day. And it deleted that too.

Eyes on the screen, now as blank as it had been before I began, as blank as many days ago, I was seized by a utopian fantasy common to scientists and mystics: to travel in time. To go back to the beginning and start over. Change history. Do it all differently. Delete the past. As if time were neither irreversible nor unidirectional.

In truth I had changed something. I was again who I had been before, the person who did not write. I had broken my part of something with Daniel.

But, even though I wouldn’t be writing the book that he had forgotten all about, I was still waiting for him.

WHEN MARCOS CAME IN, my living room swirled with scents I hadn’t known existed. Something about his forehead suggested he’d been doing a lot of thinking over the past few months. Though his eternal security was intact, his movements were not so dominating. He didn’t bring me flowers or candies but a poster advertising the first performance of Peter Pan on December 27, 1904, in the Duke of York’s Theatre.

“There’s no place like your own country,” he said, standing on my porch and looking out at the rain. “Not even the rain is the same somewhere else.”

True enough. Especially when the possessive “your” is expansive and real. Coming home through the front door is a very fine thing to do. Enjoying all the good stuff: the sun, the sea, the people, and the security of knowing the shortcuts and hiding places, all the ins and outs. Having your problems taken care of, being freed of worries about money, food, transportation, shelter, or even vacations and travel. Those last two are problems a large slice of the population doesn’t have, since they’ve never expected much in that regard.

I can’t think of a better life, anywhere in the world, than the good life here and now.

All those ideas passed through my mind, but I didn’t voice a word of them. I could save my breath with Marcos, because it was as if we spoke two different languages. His reflections didn’t stimulate mine.

By contrast, I was always hanging on what came out of Daniel’s mouth. Everything he said moved something inside me. For him, I always had answers and questions.

“How was London? Did you like it?”

“No. Everything you’ve read, seen, and heard is true. It’s gray, rainy, and the churches are pretentious.”

“Yes, that’s clear from the movies. Don’t you have any more personal impressions, now that you’ve lived there awhile?”

“Yes. The impressions of a foreigner with a middle-size business in the midst of a city that feels like a planet. You see all kinds of people and you think everyone must be welcome. Not so. The English understand who really belongs, and they let you know it. If you’re not a blue-eyed Smith, then stay in your place and get used to it. We’ll applaud your good manners while reminding you that you’re not one of us. Do you know how many refugees from political conflicts there are in the world? Ten million. Europe is tired of them. Europe still has the pie, but it’s getting smaller and smaller while more and more slices have to be cut. In spite of all their colonizing and exploitation, they don’t think they owe anything to anybody. They say they’ve fought for what they have, which is why they’re not as bad off as others. They’re not very fond of being invaded by foreigners trying to make a living, working for less than themselves. They blame the foreigners for whatever goes wrong: violence, crime, low wages, and terrorism. I wouldn’t be surprised to find us back in the days of segregated buses, like in Montgomery.”

Not being a blue-eyed Smith must have hurt Marcos quite a bit, because otherwise racism and xenophobia would just be words out of left-wing periodicals to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like London, but that he hadn’t managed to conquer it. And now he was returning to a place where he could be powerful and well above average, the way his mother had taught him that one ought to live.

“It’s all manipulation, the democracy of money,” his diatribe against savage capitalism continued. “You assume that if you have a car and a cell phone, you’re happy. To sustain that happiness, people put up with a lot. Don’t believe the myth that everybody goes on vacation. Despite the famous European prosperity, there are people who barely make it to the end of the month, who lose their jobs and can’t pay their bills, who one day find they’re not middle class but jobless, with no future other than begging. Europe is in crisis. Naturally they don’t want foreigners. They’re afraid. Poverty always brings meanness of spirit.”

Now I was listening closely, wondering whether these reflections were propelled, for the first time, by the good of Humanity and a fairer world—or whether, like so many times before, they were born of his desire for his own good, in a world as unjust as ever but on his side.

“Did you leave Monica because you couldn’t stand London?”

“Yes. Well, I tried to convince her we should move someplace less aggressive where we’d feel more comfortable. But her family are used to being foreigners wherever they go. Or maybe if you’re from the First World you’re never a foreigner, even when you change countries. It’s just us who are foreigners, when we leave the Third World for the First.”

“It would be nice if the whole world were First. There would always be adventurous souls who changed where they lived, but that would just mean moving somewhere with different climate and customs.” I tried to imagine a planet such as I had just described, but Marcos did not give me much time.

“I offered Monica’s father a thousand ideas for entering much less competitive markets. I drafted prospectuses that would have made him a millionaire. But no, they’re very stubborn. All I could get was a meeting of the board, where the vote went against me. That was the end of that.”

“Democratic centralism. The minority has to obey the majority. We learned that in Marxism class,” I said with a smile.

“Right. The fantasy that if you group a lot of stupid people together they make a smart one. How many visionaries do you know? How many people who are really geniuses are there in the world? Why should we pay attention to mediocrities? Just because there are more of them? Who’s caused the world to progress, gray masses or individual geniuses? There are a few smart people, and then there’s human stupidity, which is deep and wide. Does the common sense of the majority solve problems, or the inspiration of the few?”

“I don’t believe in lone wolves who range so far ahead that their goals are invisible to the rest who come behind,” I said. “There are lots of gray people, as you put it, working toward modest goals, who achieve things that eventually become great feats, accomplished slowly through mutual effort. It’s all very well to design a pyramid, but if nobody takes on carrying the stones, it’ll never really exist.”

“You should have been a nun, Marian. Your resignation has always seemed to me like a preemptive rejection of anything good you could achieve in life. Losing before you start to play, accepting whatever comes. How are you doing, by the way?”

“I’m doing well. I’m here. Where everybody is like me. I have two last names, in Spanish, like everybody else. The thing is, here we don’t look down on foreigners. We worship them instead.”

Marcos laughed. Whatever he might say, he was happy. He had good things awaiting him, and the failed marriage didn’t seem to bother him much. He said they weren’t yet legally divorced. Maybe he was trying to decide whether that would be useful or not.

“Well, Marian, here I am again. For a while I’ll be swamped with the new office and job and everything, but promise me that when I’m free, we’ll have dinner. Did you know that in London the food is very bad?”

“No, I thought they only drank tea.”

Marcos looked out at the rain and took a deep breath. Though his motives for coming back were most likely very calculated, he did like being here.

He took his leave, but not before commenting, “And your new friend? You haven’t said anything about him.” Old school as he is, Marcos couldn’t manage any other word to refer to his successor.

“He’s gone.”

“Where to?”

“Madrid. Since then, no news,” I added quickly, as if I had a lot of information I didn’t want to share.

“He’ll be back, you’ll see.”

He kissed me on the forehead and left.

No one had offered Daniel the co-directorship of a Canadian firm in Havana. He didn’t have a mansion in a fine neighborhood and a pseudo-empress mother. Nor a wife with a pedigree and a family business. Perhaps he would be happy over there, if he could hold onto his dreams long enough to make them come true. Meanwhile, he’d say that the best things Spain had to offer were for everyone, like paintings and the streets. His Europe would be different, much less ambitious, I told myself while watching the raindrops thin out and disappear.

London is gruff and has no seacoast. I looked at Havana, bordered by miles of ocean, but for the first time I felt the water was besieging us. What we have is a wall where sea meets land, not a beach that one can walk from end to end, setting foot simultaneously in city and sea. What we can do is to look out over the waves, which exist as a promise of the rest of the world. But the promise is unreliable. Like Daniel’s return.

I decided to go out.

The sea was flat, as if someone had spread a blanket over the water to put it to sleep. There were two suns, it seemed. One hung inside a long, grey stripe of sky, suspended immobile over the sea. The other was in the water painting a circle of orange light. The cloud-sun was dropping down to reunite with the sea-sun. As if someone up above had switched on a light, the city glowed yellow this Friday at six p.m.

Everyone who’d been waiting for the rain to stop rushed out of their workplaces. Lines of speeding cars filled both sides of the seaside drive, while some of the many trying to cross on foot made matador moves at them, much to the drivers’ annoyance.

The seawall filled up rapidly. People sat looking at the dampened city, the sunset, and the curving Malecón flanked by sea on one side and shaky pastel-colored buildings on the other.

The people eyed each other. They were looking to sell and buy, to exchange friendly talk, to complain about the generally bad state of things. To say how fine these afternoon rains were for shaking off the heat. Or how, no matter how much it rained, nothing would change.

I took my seat in those bleachers. I always enjoyed the atmosphere after a rain.

A car slowed down and a woman opened the rear door in the middle of four lanes of traffic. She dropped a puppy out. It was small and naked-looking.

“Damn, look at that!” shouted some boys next to me.

“What kind of sons of bitches would do that?”

“Should we grab it?”

“We won’t have time.”

“I can’t watch,” said the only girl in the group.

I followed the scene, hypnotized. The puppy was still in the middle of the road. Stupefied by the lights, noise, and traffic, it watched the car drive away. It was right on the yellow line. It tried to move, but couldn’t. Trembling, it tried again. One car managed to avoid it with a suicidal swerving maneuver, and the dog returned to the yellow line, shaking. It kept going in that direction, into the path of a car whose driver was not as skillful or not as nice.

I closed my eyes to avoid seeing the end. The boys yelled and I knew it was all over. I wondered whether I could have written this up for the collection of sad events.

Olga was seated in my chair, smiling warmly, her complexion somewhere between white and pink, like the color of a Nordic baby’s butt. She gave me a big hug, and I felt that something good was about to happen, some Viking energy she had brought back was going to change my life.

Everyone around us looked happy too, as if Olga and I were very special and everyone had been waiting to gawk at our reunion.

“Marian, I’m going to live in Reykjavik. The dean of the Foreign Language Faculty and I are getting married. That means I’ll have to leave everybody. Will you miss me?”

This was truly unexpected. Olga, that adorable plump presence, my abundant angel who looked out for me even without knowing it? Did fat sixty-something women marry Icelanders? Would the head of the Spanish Language and Literature Department of the University of Havana go off and live someplace where they spoke a tongue that was half Swedish and half Latin?

“Do you know what everyone has told me? That you’re stupendous as department head! They’ll be delighted to work with you for the next two hundred years.”

Everyone applauded and agreed. Their lives had been good during my administration, in which I demanded only that they teach their classes and give their exams, and they had done so. We had only a few meetings, in which I asked for whatever favors I wanted done, not ordering anyone to do them.

During that time, I learned that the verb to solve does not apply only to equations, riddles, and crossword puzzles. One also solves or resolves the issues of rentals at the beach, powdered milk, children’s school uniforms, or appointments for an ultrasound.

I learned that the grammatical tense of this verb always implies during working hours. And finally, that this isn’t anybody’s fault.

Therefore, Q.E.D.

The verb to solve, when used in this grammatical tense, should be considered as a synonym for to work.

I was democratic, everyone agreed.

Once again the advantages announced themselves to me. The Spanish Language had been invented in Spain, the Royal Academy of the Language was located in Madrid. The Academy seeks to instruct us, so we will not forget the words the Spaniards gave us after they left us bereft of our own. Olga has traveled frequently to the Mother Country on departmental business. And so, who knows. . . .

On the steps I met up with my students. They had already said hi to Olga, learned she was getting married, she was leaving, and if I accepted her proposal I’d be taking her place. I assumed they had thoroughly considered whether this would be better or worse for them, and then reached the eternal conclusion of the young: that the question is not so important and the answer will take care of itself.

If I were an eighteen-year-old student I would already have forgotten Daniel, I thought, as Ana winked at me while dancing down the stairs.

On my way out of the building, the secretary intercepted me to say that the reporter who never got to interview Daniel now wanted me to answer some questions about the university’s joint projects with the Writers Union.

While we were talking, a 1960s-model Harley-Davidson stopped directly in front of the street door, looking as if it had emerged from an Easy Rider publicity still.

A tall boy stepped off, dressed all in black, carrying his helmet in one hand and a hibiscus flower in the other. Ana ran to him, hugged him, and kissed him again and again. Her friends came over to greet the boy, who smiled steadily while stroking Ana’s hair.

The two of them got on the cycle and Ana said goodbye to her friends, the secretary, and me. The Harley-Davidson left, as if driving into the sunset, The End.

Many years after the war, after hunger, corpses, camps, marriages, separations, divorces, books . . . he had called. It’s me. She had recognized his voice. It’s me . . . His voice trembled, and that’s when she recognized the accent.

—Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover

I was standing in the corner of the bedroom next to the answering machine. When the phone rang, as always, I didn’t lift the receiver. I waited, while my heartbeat sped up.

It was Daniel.

He was speaking with a new accent. The one that belongs to those who have tamed their Cuban inflections to lean toward that more pure-blooded speech. With the receiver in my hands, but still mute, I leaned back into the junction of the two walls and slid into a sitting position.

A braver Marian answered, saying something so absurd that it made him laugh. His laugh was the same as always—engulfing my body, filling the room with sound as if the sea had come crashing in. His way of enjoying me as he enjoyed everything. My way of loving you, Daniel, because you were everything and I wanted to be everything for you.

I couldn’t disguise my nervousness. I wanted to tell him that in those endless months I had done nothing but think about him. Or that in spite of everything, I still thought about him.

To tell him: Come over right now, I’m dying to see you, for you to touch me, to tell me what maybe you’ve forgotten but I repeated to myself every night. Or not to tell him anything, while making clear that I’m dying to.

But it was hard to say any of this to someone who had come back as a voice with a foreign accent. So I asked the question one asks in such situations. He answered that he’d been in town for quite a while and soon he’d explain why he’d taken so long to call. I told him he didn’t need to explain anything.

“When can we see each other?” I asked, looking at the clock.

“About one, if you’ll invite me to eat.”

My brain began to function after a long idle time. I said yes, while recalling the phone numbers of two paladares that delivered Chinese food.

I would buy beer, because the weather was so hot. Cristal was the brand he liked. And I would buy ice cream. And coffee, a good brand that wouldn’t clog the espresso pot. And some mild cigarettes. Lucky Strikes would do. The gas station on the corner would have all of that for sale, in dollars. This took me only a few seconds to plan.

“I’ll expect you.”

“I expect so. You haven’t changed.” I couldn’t tell whether that was a question or a statement.

“Yes I have. I’m a mess,” I answered, as if that were something I was happy about.

At six o’clock, the table had a resigned expression suggesting knowledge that it was not about to experience elbows, crumbs, or any sort of stain. I didn’t cover the untouched serving dishes, or clear away the clean plates, glasses, and knives, and forks. I didn’t remove the spotless tablecloth. I didn’t light up a virgin Lucky Strike or open a can of lukewarm beer. While I searched for my bag, my keys, the door, and a destination in the city, I thought about my dead mother, solitude, days gone by and things lost. About Daniel, and about the time for waiting being over.

The phone rang and I heard Sergio’s voice leaving a message. During the war in Iraq, seven thousand archaeological sites have been looted. In that crusade, which is sweeping away the most ancient of what we are, the original volume of The Arabian Nights has been destroyed.

Havana-Montagnola

October 2006–September 2008