Cohiba

The lobby is swarming with people. All the countries of the world simmering in a single broth. He is nowhere to be seen. The shouts of a British group stand out from among the sweaty babel, arguing with a mulatto guard. They demand to be allowed to stay in the cinema to see the next Japanese film, refusing to stand in yet another line. One of them is a member of the jury of the Havana Film Festival. The guard talks to them about equal rights and even about revolution. As I am about to cross the doorway, I feel his breath on the back of my neck. He’s right there, holding his body against mine. In the chaos of people pushing to get out nobody notices anything strange about the way his hands grab my waist. Look at me, at least once. His voice is low, serene, dark as his skin. He doesn’t have a closed, inland accent. Please. Look at me. He slides his left hand downwards. The right hand continues past it and stops in the middle of my stomach. For a moment I am surprised by how natural his hands feel holding my body (as if he knew it by heart). The crowd pushes us forward. I escape his grip and cross the doorway.

Forty degrees wait for us outside. Cubans and foreigners mingle in a line that is three blocks long, credentials hanging from their necks. I look for the Brasileira, the Basque’s red shirt, the Hungarian’s gigantic body. People shove their way down the tiny stairs. Some arrive to the showing late; others get dragged there by the current. I fight the desire to look at him until someone stumbles and pushes me up against the naked back of a mulatto woman with grey eyes. She turns her head around and laughs like a snake charmer. Our skin slides off one another’s; there’s nothing to grab. Black people of all shades are scattered among the Europeans. A hand slips up from beneath the jumble of bodies and grabs mine before the mulatto woman is able to say anything. The Brasileira flashes her string of white teeth. She has a mole just above her lip and a birthmark on her neck, the trace of an eternal kiss. Lightly smudged make-up from the night before gives her a halo of glamour, like a classic film star. Her breath is sweet with alcohol; she has carried a flask of rum in her purse since the first day and takes short pulls from it as if it were filled with Bach Flower Remedies.

She goes down the remaining stairs two by two, cutting across diagonally, barking for them to let us through, it’s an emergency. The Basque waits at the corner, tying the laces of his orthopaedic shoe. One leg is twenty centimetres shorter than the other and he weighs only fifty kilos. He’s warned me five times since we first met (seventy hours ago to be exact) that he’s of no use as anyone’s protection. The Hungarian woman is exactly the opposite, both in size and in spirit. Her stories are as exuberant as her body. She crosses the street in between cars, devouring a melting ice-cream cone. We have one hour before the next movie shows, she says in perfect Spanish. Let’s go to the cemetery. She walks on, not bothering to wait for an answer. She’s a director’s assistant in Budapest, she’s used to giving orders. She was married to a Cuban for a decade, she knows the island by heart, her youngest daughter was born in Varadero and grew up eating fish and oranges. She has been insisting on taking us to the place where her husband proposed matrimony since the day we arrived.