The Sweet Sadness

I Was Sitting in the Fausto Bar on Colon Street in Havana one October night, feeling very sorry for myself.

I was 36 years old, a reasonably successful, recently divorced businessman. I had received a small legacy of land on the Isle of Pines, south of Cuba, and had come down to see what it was worth. It wasn't worth much. I sold it for $900. I also had a legacy from the Emperor of Japan – eight wounds acquired trying to crash a beach party at Tulagi. I would have sold them for a lot less than $900. On this night every one of them ached and quivered in the muggy tropical heat of Cuba's rainy season. I was determined to drink up my $900 in Havana, and, since my doctor had warned that a week's binge might be too much for a fellow who had survived 11 wartime operations, I was wondering if that might not be the best solution to the whole goddamned situation.

I felt a small flick on my forehead, then another, and another. Somebody was spitballing me. I was annoyed and tried to ignore it. Then one fell in my drink. I was obviously the target of one of the three prosties sitting at the other end of the bar, all of whom were grinning at me.

I pushed the drink with the spitball in it petulantly toward Pepe, the bartender. "Otro, Pepe. Quien?"

"La chica, Maria," he said, nodding toward one of the girls. Her hair was black, curly, and cut short. She wore small, exquisite silver earrings and a hammered silver bracelet. She was of medium height, and her full, trim figure was tightly encased in a low-cut maroon dress made of some shiny material.

I scowled. She smiled. She had wonderful white teeth. My scowl faded into a grin. This chica was a beautiful animal.

Perhaps I should say that these Havana chicas are girls who sit in the night bars of the port and wait for men. They wear low-cut gowns, and when a man enters the bar they all smile and lean forward to demonstrate the abundance of their natural resources. They are young and pretty and some might even be called stunning. Technically they are prostitutes, but that is an inexact classification because they are not materialists, and, while they take the money, they do not always insist on it. If they like a man they will accommodate him simply pour le sport, as the French say, or because they are sad that he cannot afford to rent their bodies for a night. They do not think of themselves as putas, but as artistas. Which, come to think of it, most of them certainly are.

I nodded slightly to this chica, Maria, and she came sauntering up to sit beside me, her hips twitching like a cat's. This is a large order of female, I thought to myself. Muy grande!

Now, although I know enough key words in Spanish to do the necessary things, such as ordering a meal or insulting a bus driver, I don't really hablo. Since she did not hablo ingles, our conversation got off to a rather confused start.

She wriggled around on the bar stool, smoothed down her dress, took one of my hands in hers, and smiled. "Mejora," she said. That's better.

"Yes," I said, patting her hand reassuringly. I went on to say that I was not a guy to be prejudiced against a person because of the line of work they were in. "But I don't think I'm interested in you professionally at the moment," I added, "although you're very attractive."

To this inane little speech she merely replied languidly: "Fats Domino."

I thought she was trying to kid me with a Latin phrase she had picked up in church or somewhere. I laughed and started "Omnia Gallia," but I couldn't remember the rest of it and it sounded silly anyway.

The jukebox had switched to another record. She closed her eyes ecstatically.

"Knocking Goal," she breathed.

"I didn't quite get that."

"Knocking Goal. Knocking Goal. You lige?"

"I never knocked one that I know of. Is it fun?"

"I lige Knocking Goal mucho!"

A familiar voice of liquid honey issued from the jukebox. Of course. Knocking Goal. Nat "King" Cole. Spanish was really very simple once you got the hang of it.

"And a happy Harry Belafonte to you," I said brightly.

She laughed and squeezed my hand against her breast. "I lige Harry Belafonte mucho!"

We had found a common language. Things were going great for me, Nat "King" Cole, and Harry Belafonte. I began to feel better. Mucho.

"Drink?" I asked.

"Bay-beh," she replied, as if tutoring a child.

I was with it now. "Beber," pronounced "bay-beh," means "drink" in Spanish.

"Bay-beh, baby?"

The bar rang with laughter.

"Si," she said. She squeezed my leg companionably with her long fingers. "Absinthe, Pepe."

Absinthe, the parfait d'amour, which is so aphrodisiacal that it cannot be sold in the United States.

"Dos absinthe, Pepe," I said. I was beginning to feel really wonderful.

We sipped absinthe. I was slowly enveloped in a warm, sensuous drowsiness. She played erotically with my fingers. I bit the lobe of her ear lightly. She kissed me on the lips; her strong, half-parted red lips around the gleaming white teeth worked sweetly and with purpose against my own.

I knew then that I had never really been kissed before, with such a meaningful pressure of the lips, bringing into quivering awareness every nerve in my body.

Suddenly I wanted this magnificent jungle she-thing very much. I knew she was for rent, and I knew I would pay any price to get her, although I had never paid for a girl before.

"Cuanto?" I whispered.

"Ten dollah liddle wile, twenny all night." She knew the English for that.

"Donde?" I didn't want to take her to my hotel.

She took me by the hand and we left the bar. She hailed a taxi and gave directions to the driver.

From a hundred bars and cabarets in the hot Havana midnight came the insistent rhythms of the bongo drums, and the olive and brown and black bodies swayed and twitched, came together and parted. Passion hung in the air, an almost tangible thing. We kissed and explored with a tender ferocity. Forgotten now my dolor, my loneliness, the pain of my wounds. All the sensations of which my body was capable were concentrated. It had never been like this before. Never.

The driver wheeled the cab recklessly down the Avenida del Puerto toward the docks, then along Desamparados with its lounging sailors and neon-lit honky-tonks, and pulled up at last at a waterfront motel near the foot of Aguila Street. The proprietor, a smiling young Cuban, showed us into a room, turned on the lights, and backed discreetly out. The girl locked the door and turned to face me.

If an American tourist couple from Beloit or Evansville ever happened by some twist of fate to get lodging for the night in this "motel," they would undoubtedly be both shocked and mystified by the decor. The whole room was cunningly designed for erotic arousal. There were mirrors in the headboard and footboard of the big, low bed and mirrors in the ceiling and on all four walls and in the floor. Between the mirrors were photographs and paintings to excite the imagination and suggest all sorts of forbidden pleasures. At various points around the room were carved phallic and fertility symbols. There were backless chairs and couches and a variety of plumed and feathered instruments of amorous dalliance.

The immediate effect of all this was to depress me terribly. I could feel desire draining out of me under the impact of that diabolical room. Oh, sordid, sordid!

Maria must have sensed all this, for she came and sat beside me on the bed and stroked my hand comfortingly.

"Iz OK, hon-ee," she said. She smiled understandingly and kissed me, not passionately, but sweetly. Con triste.

"Iz OK." She reached for a light switch in back of the bed. The lights in the ceiling and in all the mirrors went off, leaving only the bed visible in a dim, soft glow. The hideous room was shut out; only the bed and the girl and the lonely, aging man were real.

She stood up and began taking off her clothes. It was a kind of refined but immensely suggestive striptease, and when she stood before me at last, completely naked, my desire returned with a rush and every nerve and cell ached for her.

For what stood before me was the most exotically beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her body was magnificently molded in shining bronze. Her nipples, erect with desire, were dark against the gold of her breasts, with just the faintest tinge of fire at the tips. She kept on her silver bracelet and earrings, and around one ankle was a silver anklet with a tiny bell. She had put a white gardenia in her hair, and its scent, mingled with that of her own perfume, filled the air with a vague, delicate promise of delight.

She bore me down upon the bed and undressed me. Then, with every part of her golden body, she loved me as I had never been loved before, as I had never known a woman could love a man. Skillfully and with a delicious deliberation she used that marvelous body as an instrument of satisfaction that drew from me torturously and tenderly every last spark of tension and desire and left me at peace. Floating serenely on that tide of satiety, we lay there for a long while. We stretched languorously and rubbed our toes together and she lit two cigarettes and put one in my mouth.

I reached out my hand and touched one of her breasts.

"Quien?" I said.

"Fats Domino."

"Quien?"

"Harry Belafonte."

My hand moved down her body.

"Quien?"

"Knocking Goal."

"I lige Knocking Goal mucho!"

She laughed, delighted with the little game.

Slowly an irritating idea speeded into my mind. Any man with ten dollah for liddle wile or twenny for all night could play this game with her. Ten lousy bucks would make the night a sparkling thing for him, too. How many times had those obscene mirrors reflected that brazen torso twisted into the image of some lecher's imagination? After all, she was a whore.

So, because the idea hurt me and I wanted to hurt her, I said smugly: "For me, mucho por amor, primero por dinero." I had loved a great deal, but this was the first time I had paid for it.

It did hurt her. She averted her eyes for a moment. Then she took my hand, kissed it, and placed it on her breast.

"Para mi, mucho por dinero, primero por amor." She had done it many times for money, but this was the first time for love.

The word "love" in the mouth of a whore is supposed to be a lie and usually is, but somehow I could believe her. After all, she too had reached that breathless instant of tiny death in my embrace. And there was that something between us– there isn't any name for it. We had touched each other. I don't mean sexually. That, too, but also the other thing. We were simpatico. Whore or not, she had laid a finger on an empty heart.

"Amor?" I said.

"Si."

I kissed her hand and put it over my heart.

"Me, too," I said. "Amor."

She sighed and smiled, because it was (continued overleaf) Sweet Sadness (continued from page 14) amor, and nothing could ever come of it.

"Triste," she said. The sweet sadness.

I shook my head. "No. Dolor." The bad sadness.

She nodded. "Muy dolor."

•

That was the only time I paid her. We were together constantly after that. We took the 32 bus out to Playa la Concha, swam in the calm, turquoise waters of the Gulf, then got daiquiris from the bar and sipped them when we sunned on the yellow sand. We went to the movies and held hands like high school kids. We sat on benches in Parque Zayas and watched the small boys play baseball. We took the night boat from Batabano over to the Isle of Pines and spent a week there, taking the mineral baths at Santa Fe and riding horseback into the pine-covered, marble hills. And when I worked in my hotel room, she sat and watched me with a curious intentness or roamed restlessly about, smoking and waiting. And when she could stand it no longer she would come over and press her breasts against my cheek and begin the teasing that would bring us finally to the bed and a wild, wonderful joy.

Maria was more than my chica. She was my tender comrade, my girl, my lover. I did not ask questions about her past. I knew it must have been bad. And she did not question me. Never once did she ask me about my marital status. We had each other for the present. It was enough.

One day she invited me to come to her casa. She had never done that before. It was an address on Aguila Street near Colon, a neighborhood that had once housed the famous brothel Casa Marina which so fascinated Joseph Hergesheimer. Many chicas now lived in this area. 110 Aguila Street was far from being a fashionable address.

Her two-room walk-up turned out to be cool and spotlessly clean. A little statue of Saint Lazaro, the patron saint of prostitutes, pimps and the poor, stood in one corner of the combined living and bedroom with a votive candle burning in front of it. We sat down on the bed and embraced.

The door from the kitchen opened and in toddled a cute little boy of about four. He stood in front of me and smiled shyly.

"Papa," he said.

"Well, who are you?" I asked gaily.

But I needed only one look at those black eyes and fine, even features to know who he was, and I did not feel very gay.

Maria said simply: "Niño mío." My little one.

I had never thought of her as a mother. Or even as having been married. Or (Oh, God!) being married.

But the shock of learning that my chica had a four-year-old child was nothing to what came next. Placing her hands on her stomach, she said: "Otroniño." Another little one.

I couldn't believe it. I had noticed the soft fullness of her body but had thought it only that roundness of the lower midriff that Latins consider attractive but that American women go to great lengths to conceal.

"You mean you're pregnant? Preñada?"

She lowered her eyes. "Si."

"How many months? Meses?"

"Tres."

"Husband? Marido?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "He go. Vamos! I don' know ware."

I was hurt. I was angry. I felt deceived. But gradually it dawned on me that she had paid me a great compliment by asking me to come to her casa and meet her little boy, and by telling me that she was pregnant. She trusted me. And she was in a terrible spot. I couldn't take her to the States with me. I couldn't stay in Havana and support her. I had contracts, commitments, and an unbreakable business date in New York the following week.

Her husband had vamoosed. And, pregnant, she could not much longer sit in the bars and rent her body to men. I began to feel the deepest compassion for her.

"Amor por marido?" I asked her gently.

Her eyes filled with tears. "No. Amor por usted."

She did not love her husband. She loved me.

"Marido borrachón," she said. Her husband was a drunk.

He was more than that, as it turned out. He was also a murderer. In Spanish and broken English and with many gestures and tears, she told me the story.

She and her husband, Felipe, had been married five years ago when she was 17. He was a professional boxer who fought under the name of Kid Gonzalez. Things had been fine at first. Then he had started drinking. When he was drinking he was ugly. He could get no more fights. Their money ran out. He got drunk and stayed away from home for days, weeks. That was when she began leaving the baby in the care of a neighbor's little girl and sat in the night bars to invite the rental of her body.

But when Felipe did come home, he was insanely jealous of her. He would not let her sit in the bars. One night, about two months ago, he had seen her enter a hotel with an American. He had waited in an alley and when they came out of the hotel he had pulled the American into the alley and beaten him so badly that he had died. So now the police were looking everywhere for Felipe.

How, I asked myself bitterly, did I get into this mess? And how was I do get out? Felipe had killed an American who had slept with his wife. I was also an American who had slept with his wife. I must get out of Cuba right away, I thought. I must forget this Habana chica.

She sensed the revulsion in me. "Amor por usted!" she wailed. "Oh, hon-ee, don' go!"

"You didn't tell me you were married," I said virtuously, "Puta pérfida!" Faithless whore.

She threw herself down on the bed and began a wild, uncontrolled sobbing. The little boy, watching her big-eyed and amazed, began to cry too.

But my shock, fear, and revulsion quickly subsided, and I felt for her the greatest and most tender affection. She-had not deceived me. She had been courageous enough to tell me the truth. And I was being a real s.o.b. about it.

I began to feel ashamed. I stroked her hair and kissed her. "Amor," I said gently. "Amor and dolor." Love and the bad sadness.

We embraced for a long moment. The little boy, reassured, toddled out into the other room.

"What are you going to do?" I asked. "Qué?"

She pointed to her stomach. "Medico take out. Mañana."

"No!" I remonstrated. "Niño muy grande. Muerte!" The pregnancy was too advanced. She might die.

But she was adamant. She would have the baby "Taken out." Then she could sit in the bars again. How could she support two children? And if she did not have the abortion, how could she support one?

Her logic was irrefutable. How, in-deed? There are no jobs for women of her class in Cuba. In the Cuban scheme of things, her caste was as surely fixed as that of an Indian untouchable. She was an "artista."

We hadn't spoken of money since that first night at the waterfront end of Aguila Street. Now I opened my wallet and handed her two 10-peso bills. She threw them in my face.

I kissed her and left.

I didn't get much sleep that night. My poor, passionate, dear Habana chica, what will become of you? Yet, in the back of my mind, I could not help (concluded on page 68) Sweet Sadness (continued from page 16) but wonder – how much of what she tells me is the truth? Am I being set up for something? Is it all some kind of a con? Does she really love me? Or does she really love her husband? Can a whore really love anybody?

I had the answers very soon.

• • •

For three days I did not see Maria. She did not come to my hotel, nor was she in the Fausto Bar. I went to 110 Aguila Street; she and the child were not there and an old woman informed me that they had moved and left no forwarding address. I got very drunk.

One afternoon, just two days before I was due to fly to New York, I was trying to do some work in my room when there was a knock on the door. It was Maria.

Two things had happened, she said. First, I was right about the abortion. The pregnancy was too advanced. She would have to have the baby.

Second, Felipe had returned. He was sober and he had money – a lot of money. He would not say how or where he got it. He was still running from the police. He said he wanted to live with her and their son again, and he promised to stay sober. He sounded very contrite. But, because of the police, they would have to move.

So they had moved, and she would not tell me where. She did not love him any more, she said sadly, but what was she to do?

I held her dear face in my hands. "Yo te amo," I said.

"Yo te amo!" she cried. "Siempre!" Forever. It is the oldest lie in the world, but we do not mean it to be.

We cried, we kissed, we embraced, we went to bed.

"Magnifico!"

"Si, muy magnifico."

It was dark by the time we got up and dressed. "To the Fausto," I said. "Bebamos." When you don't dare think, you drink.

The Fausto was four blocks down the street from my hotel. You walked down Agramonte to Trocadero, across Trocadero to Morro, down Morro to Colon, then across Colon toward the Prado.

Morro, after six P.M., is deserted on its lower stretches. One side of it runs along Zayas Park, and this park, a pleasant enough place in the daytime, is a forbidding jungle at night.

As we neared the corner of Morro and Colon, a man leaped suddenly out from behind the line of palms in the park and ran toward us.

Maria gasped. "Felipe!"

He was on me like a leopard, his dark, ring-scarred face livid with rage. He'd been drinking. Without a word he slammed me into a litter-strewn alley and drove his fists into my face. I went down as if I had been pole-axed. I had no chance with him. He hurled himself at me, snarling like a beast. Blood gushed from my nose and mouth. His knee crashed into my groin. I felt myself blacking out.

It was then that Maria answered all my questions.

She picked up an empty run bottle that was lying on a refuse pile. She could have hit Felipe over the head with it and perhaps saved my life and his skin, but she didn't.

The Havana branch of the Royal Bank of Canada was located on the corner of the alley and Morro Street. Maria hurled the bottle through the side window of the bank.

Bells, alarms and buzzers went off with a roar like that which ensues at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Before Felipe could get to his feet a night watchman, gun in hand, bolted through the bank's side door and covered him. In not more than five seconds the alert Havana policia were swarming in the alley. They were very glad to see Felipe. They handcuffed him and took him away. An ambulance lugged me off to the Anglo-American Hospital.

To save me, Maria had sent Felipe to prison for life. She had chosen to bear another child in loneliness and poverty rather than let me be hurt. The word "love" is not always a lie in the mouth of a whore.

I never saw her again. They patched me up in a couple of days. I canceled my plane reservation, broke my "unbreakable" date in New York, and stayed in Havana for a week to look for her. I couldn't find her. I called the police. They couldn't find her either. They had no record of an "artista" named Maria Gonzalez. She simply and deliberately dropped out of sight. Because it could come to nothing, our amor.

Whatever happened to her? I wish I knew. Sometimes, over a martini in the Yale Club, I close my eyes and hear again the bongo drums in the midnight streets of La Habana, and see the sinuous brown bodies swaying to the torrid beat, and feel again on my lips that kiss that was like no other kiss ever. And in some night bar of the old port I see a golden girl with silver earrings and a silver bracelet, throwing spitballs into the drink of a lonely American. And this golden girl is the sole support of two ninos, and oh, how I wish I were that lonely American!

I will never see my Habana chica again. But – we touched.

Fats Domino.

Harry Belafonte.

Knocking Goal, hon-ee.

Triste. The sweet sadness.