There Is No Explanation

2001 September. San Antonio de los Baños / Havana. First free day; uncertain time.

On his first free day he decides to go to Havana alone. He boards the bus with the school students, boys with long hair, backpacks, sandals, Che T-shirts, a youthful international gathering that, to his eyes newly arrived from New York, seems too consistent with itself. The heat clings to his skin. Without realizing it, he has spent a few minutes missing the snow in the little garden facing Grant’s tomb, the scooter he rides to Columbia, even the cold he curses so often as he makes his way along Riverside. Here, in Havana, everything seems to stay on the body: the shirt, the air, the smells, even the looks.

He asks one of the boys where he can get something rich to eat.

He looks at him.

—Rich?

—Yes. A rich place.

He realizes too late.

Rich.

Not tasty.

Rich.

In Cuba.

He laughs and tries to correct himself, but everything is already showing: New York, the dollars, the shoes, the way he asks. The newly arrived bourgeois has managed to introduce himself before he has.

The boy smiles.

—Ah, you want to eat well.

—Exactly.

He recommends a paladar. He goes. It is expensive and bad. That restores a certain moral balance because at least he can feel swindled like any tourist.

Still hungry, he leaves and stands watching a man making music by striking buckets, cans and two pieces of metal attached to a structure that  once served another purpose. He does not know what they call those contraptions here and thinks of asking, but does not. The man plays with extraordinary precision. Tac. Tac-tac. Tac. For a few seconds the rhythm sounds like a train and he feels an unease he cannot explain. The City of Lime does not yet exist for him. Or it does, but he does not know it exists.

He has to get back to La Rampa and G before eleven to catch the bus back to San Antonio, so he starts walking without much purpose. Someone has told him that people pick each other up on the Prado. He uses another word. Perhaps resolver. Perhaps he is adding it afterward. He walks there.

At this hour Havana becomes another city. Families sitting together, men talking, boys coming and going without seeming headed anywhere. He sits on one of the benches and in less than five minutes a young man in his twenties appears and asks him the time, though he is wearing a watch. He tells him the time. The young man looks at his watch and then at him.

—Mexican?

—That obvious?

—You can tell you’re not Spanish.

—Thank you.

He laughs.

His name is Darío.

Or so he says.

For twenty minutes he tells him an entire life: he studies restoration, his mother lives in Holguín, his father was a doctor in Angola, he wants to move to Barcelona, he hates reggaeton and knows someone who can get him genuine cigars. It could all be true.

—Are you alone? —he asks.

—Now I am.

—There’s a party.

—I have to get back to San Antonio.

—The party ends tomorrow.

—Exactly.

He shows him a card.

It does not look like an invitation. It looks like a religious print.

He takes it.

It is a Virgin.

He does not know her.

The woman holds the child on her left arm and the child looks outward. There is a little star beside her shoulder.

—What is this?

—The ticket.

He turns it over.

There is no address. Only a drawing that looks like a train and one handwritten word:

Peregrinos.

He laughs.

—All very Catholic.

Darío shrugs.

—It’s not a Mass, I assure you. 

—Where is it?

—Tonight, at a station.

—What station?

—An abandoned railway station.

He gives back the card.

He shakes his head.

—Keep it.

—I’m not going.

—Doesn’t matter.

He puts it in his pocket because he thinks it is pretty.

This is what he wrote for years when he told the story of that day: he keeps it because he thinks it is pretty.

In 2025 the sentence is underlined.

In the margin someone has written:

LIE.

Below, in another hand:

He kept it because he had seen it before.

He keeps reading.

There is no explanation.