Cohiba

A white marble lobby, chandeliers, Persian rugs . . . The García Lorca Theatre is one of the few refurbished buildings in Havana. It boasts the grandeur of epochs past that can’t be found anywhere else on the island. La Bohème will begin in ten minutes. The Brasileira sets to seducing one of the guards in a way that is as natural to her as breathing is for the rest of us mortals. She bats her eyelashes until he falls into a trance. The guard lets us stand in the line reserved for Cuban residents. The people coming in are wearing long dresses and summer suits. They are foreigners, although there are also some Cubans who are not a part of the dying socialism found outside, in the streets. The Hungarian shows her old residency card and buys four tickets, while the Brasileira puts on lipstick in front of a mirror. The duo enter the lobby, dragging along their Basque-Argentine millstone. They hold their heads so high that nobody notices the Hungarian’s girl-explorer Bermudas, nor the Paulista’s skin, so damp with perspiration it looks almost bathed in oil. The soprano shrieks as if they were about to tear her to pieces. With a sigh of agony, the Brasileira sneaks off to the bathroom before the intermission. The hallway is empty and dark (in Cuba they conserve light even in the opera). Old-fashioned armchairs with corduroy upholstery and gold ribbing decorate the vestibule but in the bathroom there is nothing: no paper, no soap. A thread of water trickles from the tap, a tiny light bulb moves in circles, like a pendulum, above the hypnotized stare of the Brasileira, who follows it from below, spread out in one of the easy chairs, arms hanging over the edge, neck stretched backwards. For a second it looks broken – snapped – but she picks her head up when she hears someone come in. She lifts her dress with one hand and pulls her thong down with the other as she walks into one of the stalls. She doesn’t sit down but, barely bending her knees, opens her legs. She does a little wiggle-dance before pulling her thong back up. Tenho um presentinho pra você. She pulls a roach from her bra and holds it in her fingertips as if it were a diamond.

That’s how it was from the first day on: she would finish waking up as the sun went down. I arrived at the school at five in the morning on Sunday. The airport taxi stopped at the entrance gate so the security guard could confirm my name on the list. He assigned me a room in the last apartment module, gave me a set of keys and a warning: my Brazilian room-mate had arrived the day before. The headlights illuminated five Rationalist buildings strewn amid a field as barren as an African savannah. The taxi left me in front of the last apartment module, a cement rectangle with acrylic windows. Something tickling my left foot made me look down: it was a tiny frog; there were two more on my bag. All around me, the ground was littered with frogs.