get the best mojito. You want to drink where Hemingway drank.” He rose and laid the book on the desktop, face down and spread-eagled so they could read the title: “The Post-American World.”
“Don’t give him the satisfaction,” Jane muttered, pretending to brush a hair or cabbage leaf off John’s shoulder.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” John muttered back, slipping his arm around her. “Actually we were wondering where we should go to eat.”
“The closest McDonald’s is about 500 miles away. In Guantanamo,” the desk clerk said, his face bland and helpful.
“Gee, I don’t know, that sounds like quite a hike. Nothing in the neighborhood, then? Communism and cooking don’t mix, I guess.”
“Senor, Cuban food is the best food in the world,” the desk clerk bridled. “By this time all the paladars, the private cafes, are booked for the evening, but many touristas like our little warehouse – La Bodeguita del Medio. It is six blocks from here, in Empedrado Street.”
“Gracias, senor. Eso es muy agradable de usted,” Jane said, with measured courtesy. But even civility expressed in his native language could not allay the desk clerk’s deep-seated hostility this time.
“De nada. A propósito - I would recommend the pork. They understand pig in that place. “
“Ow!” John stopped short, as if in great pain. He flailed and thrashed a moment, and seemed to be trying to reach around and grasp something sharp located just out of reach between his shoulder blades. Jane looked at him in alarm. He dropped his arms as suddenly as he had raised them and grinned back at the desk clerk. “No worries. Just trying to pull the knife out of my back.”
Jane pursed her lips as they emerged onto the humid street, strangely mottled with the lengthening bluish shadows of a thousand paper doves. She pushed her sunglasses firmly up her nose, “I don’t suppose I can even think of showing him who he’s dealing with,” she ventured in a wistful tone.
“No, no. Fair’s fair. And he’s just a little guy. Let him live.”
“You’re a much nicer person than I am,” Jane sighed.
“But you’re a much better shot,” John said consolingly. “It all evens out.”
5 Hasta Siempre
It was the cocktail hour and the bar was a zoo, packed with people of many countries, all of them trying to Sharpie their assorted names and banalities onto the densely scribbled walls. Handed a pen, John reached up next to Salvador Allende’s signature and wrote on a somewhat less enscrawled patch of blue: “Love! Love until the night collapses.” “Cheerful,” Jane tried to say, but her words were drowned out.
Seguiremos adelante
Como junto a tí seguimos
Y con Fidel te decimos
Hasta siempre Comandante
(We will carry on
As we followed you then
And with Fidel we say to you
Until always Commander)
The band inside had everyone singing a rousing version of “Hasta Siempre,” while the bands outside did not wait their turn in silence, but set up competing serenades designed to separate tourists from their hard currency sooner rather than later, on the theory that later was a mug’s game. Everyone was impatient to get inside, where the musicians stood to make fifteen minutes worth of pesos and the tourists stood to get famously drunk; or at any rate to get drunk in a place famous people had been known to frequent.
To this end, the bar and its patrons seemed to have an understanding. Neither was interested in a long-term relationship; the tourists for the most part wanted to check off one more box on their vacation itinerary and move along, while the bar was happiest when its patrons drank, paid, and disappeared. So the queue progressed fairly quickly. The maitre d’ seemed surprised when John requested a table, as if no sane human being would deliberately choose to sit and soak up the overwrought atmosphere for the length of time it would take to consume a meal.
“Hay un problema?” John asked, a little tired of the rote antagonism.
“Senor, it is just that you are not wearing the t-shirt.” The maitre d’ leaned forward to make himself heard. “Usually the ones who eat come wearing the Hemingway t-shirt. Or the Che. Sigame, por favor.”
Easier said than done. The crowd was massed with particular intransigence around the old-fashioned wooden bar where a single bartender performed real magic, making twenty and thirty mojitos at a clip. It was quite a show. From a crate behind the bar, a pretty waitress pulled gleaming highball glasses, which she tossed one at a time to the mojito maestro, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Having set his glasses in a precise row, the bartender started an assembly line, measuring out a tablespoon of sugar each, followed by a hit of fresh lime juice poured across the mouths of the glasses in a single pass, topped with a small tight wad of mint leaves, and enlivened with a spritz of soda. Hey! Hey! Hey! A quick muddle with a wooden pestle got each concoction foaming, at which point a generous measure of rum was added, again in a smooth unbroken sweep. Four ice cubes, a pink straw, and it was all over but the quaffing. Cheers and applause! The bartender took a bow.
Two entire mojito floorshows later, John and Jane finally managed to edge through the throng to claim a small battered table in a back room that opened onto a sliver of garden hung with Christmas lights and Chinese lanterns.
“I feel like I just summitted Annapurna,” Jane said, half collapsing into her seat.
John sat down with his back to the door. “Would you call that a peak experience?”
“Careful. I’ll start singing something from ‘The Sound of Music.’ ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ maybe?” Jane pretended to be studying the laminated menu in front of her.
“You know I love it when you yodel,” John said, bending over his menu in turn. “And speaking of goat –“
“Senor, we are out of the goat tonight,” the waiter said dolefully, setting down two mojitos.
“How’s the snapper?” Jane wondered.
“Senora, we are out of the snapper tonight,” the waiter desponded, wiping his hands on his backside.
“The curry?” John essayed, looking at Jane.
“Senor, we –“
“Tell you what,” John held out the menus to the waiter, with a ten-dollar bill on top. “You order for us. All we ask is that you keep the mojitos coming.”
The waiter hesitated. “It could be there is some goat remaining – an order or two.”
“We’re in your hands, amigo,” John said, as though much depended on this. Jane leaned forward, smiling coyly. John leaned forward, in comic imitation. The waiter’s hand, holding a dual flame zippo lighter, intruded between them.
“Perdoname.” He had returned to light the votive candle in its knobbly little fishbowl. He only burned himself twice in the attempt.
“You were saying?” John prodded, when they were alone again.
Jane indicated the garden with her chin. “Strings of lights. Paper lanterns. Takes me back.”
“Colombia,” John recalled, catching her drift. “One step ahead of the Autodefensas. That flower looked good in your hair.” They clinked glasses and drank.
The mojitos were on the weak side, but good and cold. The music drifted in, the closest diners in the nearest rooms drifted out. The votive candle and a beat up chandelier overhead created a soft shell of light around them. For a moment life was good. Into that moment came a vigorously ancient and ostentatiously blind fortune-teller, chewing a huge unlit cigar and dressed in speckless white like a Western bride. Or an Asian corpse. A small, well-scrubbed boy with a carney’s cheek and a con man’s flair for patter guided her to the table.
“Hey lady! My abuela wants to tell your fortune.”
Jane smiled faintly. “I already met a tall handsome stranger.”
The fortune-teller pulled the Presidente out of her mouth and stuck it in her lacy white turban. “This is a message, not a divination, senora. The Orishas wish to speak.”
“Two for t
he price of one,” the boy parleyed. He held out his hand and, after exchanging a skeptical but resigned glance with Jane, John slipped the kid a fiver.
“Who are the Orishas?” Jane leaned forward to ask the child.
He replied by putting a finger to his lips. “Shhhh!” His grandmother was silent a moment, then began to hum and sway. The humming gave way to a garbled sort of chant that distilled into an ominous drone of words.
“Your future is both dark and dangerous,” she intoned.
“Classic!” John gave Jane a thumbs-up.
The little boy frowned heavily and shook his head at John, who obediently wilted into silence, to Jane’s amusement.
The fortune-teller was deep into her act. “I see –“ she paused and shuddered theatrically. Dropped her voice to a hushed whisper. “Monsters.” The chanting resumed, presumably to build suspense and allow her point to sink in. “But,“ she burst out and froze. Again with the melodrama. Jane closed one eye in irritation. “The Orishas ask that you remember. Who. You. Are,” the old woman admonished, stabbing a fat and paste-bejeweled finger at John for emphasis.
“I give up. Who are we?” Jane asked, her eyes straying to the turban and the fat black cigar, which had begun to smolder slightly. The merest wisp of a curl of smoke rose like incense toward the ceiling.
“The Orishas want to remind you that you are Chango and Oshun, the gods of war and beauty on earth.” Lifting her arms and her sightless eyes heavenward, the fortune teller paused as though lost in thought,