Havana Bay

Pinero.'

'He had a phone, we just haven't found it. I'd like to push that phone's memory and learn who his best friends were.'

This was the way he was at the boatyard, Ofelia thought. Absolutely certain about something invisible. The problem was that she agreed. A hustler like Rufo was incomplete without a cell phone.

There was an explosion of laughter outside as a couple walked by to a different unit. Ofelia felt compelled to explain how she knew about the Rosita, the system of jineteras and police. From the Ministry of the Interior an officer like Luna could protect Hedy and a whole string of girls at tourist bars, hotels and marinas. The Rosita was safe because it was under the wing of the police in the Playa del Este. She added, 'Luna also does things for his own protection. He and Rufo were involved together in political activities, silencing dissidents. Maybe some of those people are anti-Cuban but Luna and Rufo sometimes went too far.'

'Did Mongo?'

“No.”

'Captain Arcos?'

'I don't think so.'

'And were they all involved in Santeria, too, like the ceremony I saw?'

'That was not Santeria.' Ofelia touched her necklace.» Leave the spirits to me.'

The second time was not as ravenous but just as sweet. Pleasure left alien for so long made the skin a sensual map to be explored in detail from an undercurve of the breast to the pink of the tongue to the fine hairs of her brow.

She had a variety of endearments in Spanish. He simply liked the name Ofelia, the way it filled the mouth and spoke of dreaminess and flowers.

The second time had a slow rhythm that rolled up the spine. He wouldn't know the beat but Ofelia did, the steady rocking of the tall drum, the sideways shake of the shells on the gourd, the quicker pace of hourglass drums and then the mounting acceleration of the iya, the biggest drum with the deepest pitch and in the center of its skin a red resinous circle that spread the warmer it grew until she felt herself stretched to the breaking point, breathless while he held on, his heart pounding like a machine that hadn't worked in ages.

'Now I know everything,' Ofelia murmured.» I know all about you.'

She laid her head on his shoulder. The oddest thing, he thought, was how well she fit. Staring up at the dark, he felt he was free-floating now, as far from Moscow as a man could get.

'What does peligroso mean?' he asked.

'Dangerous.'

'A man said that at the Hemingway marina. We can start there.'

In the dark Ofelia told him about the priest in Hershey, the town where she grew up.

The priest was not only Spanish but so frail that people said it was his cassock that held him up. He became a scandal, though, when he fell in love with the manager's wife. The manager and his wife were American. Hershey was American. There were two great smokestacks of the mill belching black smoke and the wooden shacks of the workers, but in the center of town was a road of shade trees and cool stone houses with screened windows for Americans, where only Americans or Cubans with work passes were allowed. There was a baseball and basketball team run by the Americans, and American women taught school for Cuban and American children. Both the wife and the priest taught school.

She had angelic blond hair that shone through the mantilla she wore to church. All Ofelia could remember about the husband was that his Oldsmobile always gleamed because it was always being washed. The problem in Hershey was the heavy soot that came from burning bagasse, the sugarcane after the juice had been pressed out. Bagasse burned very hot and produced soot as thick as fur. It was well known among maids who worked in the houses that the manager drank, and when he was drunk he hit his wife. One time when he came to school and began to drag her out, the priest stepped in between and that was probably when all three realized that the priest and the wife were in love. Everyone saw, everyone knew.

Then all three disappeared the same night. Weeks later when men cleaned ash from the furnaces at the mill, they found a crucifix and pieces of bone. They recognized the priest's crucifix from around his neck. Everyone assumed that the manager killed him and threw his body in the oven and took his wife back to the States and that was the end of it, except, a year later, someone came back from a trip to New York and said he had seen the manager's wife walking on the street arm in arm with the priest, who wasn't dressed like a priest anymore but just an ordinary man. Everyone else in Hershey laughed at this account because they remembered the priest, how timid he was. But Ofelia believed because she had seen that very same priest fight a bull.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ofelia had gone out earlier, and he didn't recognize her at first when she returned in skintight white jeans, white tube top and white-rimmed dark glasses, and carrying bags of coffee, sugar, oranges. She had a blinding new aura, he thought, like a nuclear reactor when control rods were withdrawn, and she had for him a shirt with the embroidered design of a polo player, short-brimmed straw hat, fashionable hip pack, sunglasses.

'Where did you find these?'

'There are hotels in the Playa del Este with dollar boutiques. It's your friend Pribluda's money, but I think he would approve, no?'

He picked up the shirt.» I don't think it's me.'

'You have no choice. Luna has a picture of you. In case he circulates it, we have to make you look different.'

'I'm never going to look Cuban.'

'Not Cuban, no. If people can mistake a tourist for you, maybe they'll mistake you for a tourist.'

The truth she admitted only to herself: that she had experienced a shameful thrill walking into boutiques with so much money. She had also added a new comb and brush to her floppy straw bag. Necessities for a certain role. And to dress a man was a pleasure she felt in the marrow of her bones.

She folded his coat over a chair.» We paid for two nights, we can leave your coat here for now.'

The Playa del Este offered the overwhelming nothingness of sand and sea and houses wearing a sun- bleached memory of color rather than color itself. A billboard announced the imminent construction of a French hotel by a 'Socialist-Leninist Brigade of Workers,' and down the beach rose ranks of new hotels already built. Ofelia drove, and Arkady discovered that to ride in Ofelia's DeSoto, a vintage monster with wedge-shaped fins, was to be invisible. A white tourist with an attractive Cuban woman was instantly categorized and dismissed. For the first time, he fit in because there were examples of him and Ofelia everywhere, a tall Dutchman and a nearly miniature black girl sitting at a table under a single Cinzano parasol that constituted a sidewalk cafe, a Mexican with a blonde jinetera taking the air in a bicycle cab, a beefy Englishman with a girl tottering on new platform shoes. Ofelia identified their nationality at a glance. What Arkady noticed was that each couple held hands but had no conversation.

'They each have a fantasy,' Ofelia said.» He that he can leave his ordinary life and live like a rich man on an island like this. She that he will fall in love with her and take her away to what she thinks is the real world. It's better they can't communicate.'

But Ofelia, too, felt a welcome invisibility in her dark glasses and jeans, in the attitude of her chin, and when they passed the plate glass of a gift shop she saw the reflection of a perfectly acceptable jinetera and tourist, perhaps slightly more handsome than usual.

At the approach of a Cuban girl the guard at the gate of the Marina Hemingway started from his box, only to step back in when he saw Arkady escort her around the barrier. He led Ofelia by the marina shop and across the grass to the dock where George Washington Walls had left him off after his visit to the Havana Yacht Club. The same loud volleyball game seemed to be in progress. Other Americans trafficked back and forth with bags of laundry. A boy in cutoffs hand-trucked cases of beer to a blue-water yacht the size of an iceberg, yet Ofelia treated the sight of three canals filled with million-dollar power yachts as offhandedly as Cleopatra reviewing her barges.