"Had you ever put a price on getting out before?"

"Roll me another one," she said, flushing the toilet. "No, I'd never put a price on it. Not before that moment. But I thought about it. And I just, you know, crunched the numbers."

"What'd you come up with?"

"I told him I wanted him to pay my full tuition up to a doctorate in whatever I wanted. I wanted a car. I wanted an apartment for a year. I wanted twenty grand upfront."

"And he tore off a check?"

"He tore off a check. We walked out the door together."

"You were with him?"

"No. I saw him. But I wasn't with him. It was just your average sugar daddy arrangement for a while."

"You think so, huh?"

"Anyway, then I met somebody. And I fell in love with that somebody. That had never happened before. Or since. And I told the guy who'd gotten me out of the game and he was good about it and backed off. He gave me s.p.a.ce with it. And the guy I fell in love with fell in love with me. We played house. I was with him. And it was-I'm not sure how to put it-it was true."

I reached over and took the cigarette from her mouth.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Is everything you're telling me made up?"

"Maybe."

"Okay." I put the cigarette back between her lips. "Keep telling the story."

"I played it straight with this boy and a lot of stuff was around the corner. Playing house was nice. But one night I'm out walking my dog and I b.u.mp into that john. The sugar daddy. He offers me fifteen grand for one night. I took it. Turned the trick. And the next morning I go back to the guy I was living with and confess it."

"Why?"

"Because I loved him."

"I got that part. I meant, why'd you turn the trick?"

"Anyway-I told him it was a horrible mistake. I told him that I loved him. And he said he loved me and that we were done. That's why I left the city to come to Europe. Biggest mistake of my life."

"So the john bought you out and bought you back in?" I felt like a CNN ticker.

"I'm getting tired."

"Did you kiss the john?"

"I'm sleepy."

"Sleep here."

"Umm ... I don't think so."

"Not with me. Just sleep here. I can't sleep on the bed anyway."

"Why?" she asked.

I shrugged. "It intimidates me."

"I can't stay here with you. I can't stay here."

"Why?"

"Because this is better. For you I mean. It's a good little memory to gnaw on as it is."

She got up off the floor and looked at me, tilting her head to one side.

"I have your name," I said.

"Do you now? You know my name?"

"I don't know it," I corrected. "I have it."

I pulled out her wallet and stood up and gave it to her. We both held on to it for a second before I let go. She leaned over and I pulled back and everything was fine until she kissed me hard for a few moments, then slipped off my lips as softly as snow falling from a branch. Then she was gone and I went over to my window and watched the dawn breaking until she came out the entrance of the apartment and disappeared onto the Gran Va, a suicide's leap below my window.

15.

MUSICAL CHAIRS.

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.

"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting.

Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."

Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER I scrounged enough money to take a direct flight from Madrid to Havana. I sat with a girl named Ra on the edge of the Malecn, with Miami somewhere off in the sunset behind us, ignited against the horizon like a lit cigar dropped into a puddle of gasoline.

Ra was a pen pal who had just graduated from the university of Havana. Some Cubans I'd met in Madrid, who had married off the island, had put me in touch with her. They told me she was in love with the same books I was: Cervantes, Calvino, Kundera, Duras. Through her work designing Web sites for the government she was in the coveted position of having access to the Internet. This was exceedingly rare for Cubans. We wrote each other e-mails almost every day. It's always strange finding someone on the page before you know them anywhere else. Sometimes you get lucky and start off with a curious mutual understanding-"landsman" is the lovely word to describe that sensation. She insisted we write in English so she could improve her grasp of the language. She'd taught herself English by learning the lyrics to seemingly every song ever written. She'd never left Cuba before yet knew, in great detail, about everywhere I'd ever traveled from literature, film, art, and history books. When I told her about my mother's background she knew all kinds of details about the Hungarian revolution. After Hungary supplied Cuba with all their horribly unreliable humped Camelo buses, she'd gotten curious about the land that gave birth to those monstrosities of dysfunction.

We broke the ice with Ra's idea of small talk.

"The tourists my friends meet from Gringolandia always try to seduce us with the cars they drive back home." Ria giggled, wiping dark locks from her black eyes. We had corresponded for months, but I'd never seen a picture of her before. She was waif-thin, swimming in an oversized Terry Fox Marathon of Hope T-shirt, a little pair of battered tennis shoes beneath a white skirt patterned with purple lilacs she'd sewn on herself. She reminded me of a Cuban Audrey Hepburn, hopelessly beautiful in all her delicate features and almost apologetic grace. Over the years I would have the chance to meet several very important people in Cuban society, but I had the most luck in meeting Ra.

That day, she introduced me to her smile that involuntarily tilted her head to one side like the girl Pica.s.so captured in The Dreamer. She'd brought along some peso submarine-sized cigars for us to smoke. After she'd gushed about how much she enjoyed quality cigars, I'd felt too ashamed over our correspondence to confess that I didn't care for them. For a present I'd brought her some Romeo y Julietas from the gift shop of the Habana Libre hotel. As she bit off and spit out the end of her cigar she discovered that her lighter had run out of fluid and spiked it on the pavement at our feet. "Cubaneo," she growled. "Whatever isn't broken here will be soon."

I reached over with the flame of my match while she puffed her cigar to life. After she filled her lungs with smoke, she filled her cheeks until they expanded in Louis Armstrong proportions before exhaling. "Oh how I've missed this smoke! As I was saying, in Cuba cars themselves tell you very little about us, but you can tell everything about someone by their license plate. License plates are the Cuban people's Rosetta Stone."

"Decode all these drivers for me." I cast my hand across the lanes of traffic racing along the Malecn.

"In one glance you can tell if they are a foreigner, their job, how important they are, where they're allowed to go. Even if you had a million dollars sent to you from Miami you can't drive your car for five minutes without the government allowing you to. We stole the same system of license plates from the Soviet Union. My cousin was a secret policeman before they put him in jail for selling materials from the airport on the mercado negro. Soon they will have cameras all over the city monitoring all movements."

"What was he selling?"

"Fuel. Cigars. Food. Anything." She took a long draw from her cigar and inhaled deeply. "I can't even concentrate because this cigar is giving my lungs an o.r.g.a.s.m. Even my asthma is behaving and isn't attacking me because of how luxurious this Romeo y Julieta is. I'm not even upset you lied to me all this time in our letters about cigars. How many other things did you lie about also? All writers are such liars."

"I didn't lie to gain an advantage," I told her. "Maybe I did. I just wanted to hear your description of how much you enjoyed them."

"That is an advantage over a stranger. Cigars were the only sensual pleasure I had as a teenager."

Ra's uncle worked in a cigar factory as an inspector and brought home good stolen cigars for his family. It was the only luxury Ra's family enjoyed until the uncle was caught and lost his job. Ra and I were the same age and during the Special Period, when she was a teenager, the food shortages were so severe it was a bigger crime to kill a cow than a person. She told me her boyfriend became a "cat fisherman" from people's yards. There was no other source of meat. People went to prison for having an American dollar in their pocket. Santa Claus was illegal. But through all that awfulness her family had the best tobacco in the world whenever they wished.

"I felt like a fairy-tale girl lost in a dark forest." She laughed. "But with cigars I had my magical little fetish tune to whistle, to forget my troubles."

Ra pointed to the blue government-owned plates. She explained how the letters and numbers on the plates were indications of whether the car could be used for personal travel and where it could go. The first letter indicated which of the fourteen provinces the car came from. A "K" signified a privately owned car. Caramel plates for those higher up in government-run firms. Maybe they could only transport visiting officials during business hours or perhaps had more leeway for private use. Mint green plates were for military personnel, placed only on the rear of their vehicles. Olive green for Ministry of the Interiorissued plates, including Fidel's motorcade of armored 1980s-made Mercedes. Black plates were for foreign diplomats who mostly lived in old abandoned mansions on Havana's jarringly opulent Fifth Avenue. They were free to ignore traffic laws. Cars with white plates were for Cuban ministers or heads of state organizations. Maroon plates for rental cars. Bright orange plates for Cubans working overseas, religious leaders, or foreign journalists.

"Yellow plates for all the old American cars held up by bubble gum and Popsicle sticks," Ra went on. "Those are the only cars Cubans can legally trade and buy and sell. Only cars before 1959, when our revolution began. And for those the government has not yet decided which plates to give you, 'provisional' red plates are given. Isn't it all so egalitarian?"

"How does anybody purchase a new car?" I asked.

"With permission."

"Permission?"

"This is our version of a catch-22. To gain permission you must explain how on earth you could ever afford a new car, living on the government wages that over 90 percent of us do. Let's change the subject. I believe in the principles of this crumbling revolution, but I find it inconceivable that on your first visit you never slept with one of our women."

We'd come from the apartment she'd found me in Calle Neptuno to sit on the Malecn where the U.S. battleship Maine had mysteriously exploded and promptly sank, setting off the Spanish-American War just before the turn of the twentieth century. This was the "war" in which William Randolph Hearst invented yellow journalism for the American public. "There will be no war," one of Hearst's employees telegrammed back from Cuba. "Please remain," Hearst telegrammed back. "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." In 1898, for twenty million dollars, Spain handed over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States and in all but name took over Cuba, signing into Cuba's new const.i.tution the right to intervene and "supervise" the treasury and foreign relations. Gitmo was handed over indefinitely with the signing of the Platt Amendment soon after, with an annual fee of four thousand dollars to be paid by the U.S. Treasury, which no Cuban was involved in negotiating, and which was never to increase. But all this had come after the Spanish troops had crushed Jose Mart and the Cuban rebel army and wiped out between two hundred and four hundred thousand Cuban civilians in an eerie foreshadow of the concentration camps that would haunt the new century across Europe.

I'd tried to track down Alfonso and coordinate meeting him in Havana again, but his phone had been disconnected and he never answered any of my e-mails. I didn't know he had already been granted his wish of never having to leave Havana again since he'd been buried in the Coln cemetery for over a month at that point. Montalvo didn't have a phone or a computer, so Ra had offered to meet me at the airport. We'd shared a gypsy cab back to my original block near the Plaza de la Revolucin and discovered nearly everyone I'd met during my first trip had abandoned Cuba altogether. Two houses had been sold on the black market to finance escapes out of the country. The old man who had worked as a doorman at the Nacional had died in his sleep. Ernesto had reunited with his wife in Barcelona. The family of Jess had gotten lucky in the annual lottery of twenty thousand visas and relocated to Miami. Only Doogie Howser remained on the block, and he'd taken a mistress to Varadero and wouldn't be back for a week.

Ra had helped me work out an alternative plan, through a friend of a friend of a friend, with unregistered accommodation in Centro Habana, a little dingy neighborhood called Cayo Hueso (Bone Key). She found me a room on the roof of a four-story walk-up across the street from a building that had recently fallen down. After Ra rejected the traditional 15 percent referral fee from the married couple illegally renting me the room, they were entirely convinced she was a spy. Their mutual shock made it clear no other plausible explanation existed in their minds.

"We're happy to pay you for bringing him to us," they reiterated nervously. "This is a reasonable custom."

"I'm not opposed to the custom." Ra smiled. "But it doesn't apply here. I won't accept money for helping a friend find accommodation. If I did this in service of a stranger, I would. Claro?"

"We know times are very hard," the husband renting me the apartment reasoned. "I respect what you're saying. Don't be stubborn here."

"Then this extra money will help your family and I'm happy for that. Thank you for looking after my friend."

The husband and wife, Arnaldo and Ariana were their names, still looked petrified accepting Ra's explanation. But they had no choice. Ra had nothing left to say about it.

Back on the Malecn some kids were diving into the ocean while a trumpeter serenaded them. A fisherman clubbed his first catch with the heel of a ratty Nike sneaker as a policeman stopped a young black local girl walking hand-in-hand with an old sunburned tourist. She didn't have her papers and was taken away in a squad car to the station. The tourist hailed a taxi and gave pursuit. The nearby, supremely well-guarded U.S. Interests section was almost entirely obscured by fifty flapping Cuban flags beneath a vertical phalanx of poles pointed at the heavens. If anyone inside could see past the flags, a sign had been freshly painted, proclaiming WE DON'T WANT SLAVE OWNERS HERE. A family huddling beside us stared off at another cruise ship slugging its way across the horizon into the harbor. We got up and walked for a while under the curled streetlamps before sitting back down on Havana's collective sofa and windowsill to the world.

Eventually we walked the length of the Malecn as kids glazed the cement in sticky embraces, the waves just over the edge of the seawall. Sometimes just below their feet other people would be fooling around against the rocks, but all you could see were shadows folding like origami against the dim light of the horizon. We turned onto the Prado promenade toward some fights being held at Kid Chocolate that I'd invited Ra to watch. A pack of boys chased after a soccer ball under the trellis of trees overhead while jineteras smoked cigarettes on stone benches waiting for business. Stray cats sat and stared predatorily at the birds perched on the branches overhead. Artists were taking down their afternoon displays and packing up their canvases.

"Hundreds of years ago," Ra said, smiling, "the most beautiful women in my city could only be seen stepping in or out of carriages along Prado. Some of the first foreigners who wrote about their visits never got past just how stunningly beautiful the women's feet were."

"My boxing coach Hector sent me to Prado to observe the women after our first lesson together," I confessed to Ra. "When we were finished for the day, I asked what made the Cuban style of fighting so much more effective than anywhere else in the world. He told me to come here and sit on a bench in Prado and to study how the women walk. 'It's all right there, Brinicito. That's our secret. We try to box the way our women move. Have you ever seen women who can do more with each step than ours?'"

"He is probably a puerco." Ra laughed. "But it's an intelligent observation."

The natural light was almost entirely gone when the streetlamps flickered on and hummed beside us. Distant smokestacks rose into the last embers of glow hovering over old Havana's skyline. I'd forgotten about the mood that always seemed to haunt the Prado and so much of Havana with nearly each step. Something like catching the gaze of a beautiful teenage girl with every fuse on her body lit by s.e.xuality while smiling at you with rotten teeth. Both for Havana's beauty and its decay, it's nearly impossible to restrain yourself from staring at everything you see. I was told before my first trip that no city in the world offered the dreams you could have sleeping in Havana. However, n.o.body warned about how it also feels like an exhausting nightmare that never quite fulfills the promise of that with which it's threatening you.

A pack of jineteras, all uniformed in spandex, walking arm in arm with a group of much older, drunken, overweight, sweaty European tourists, strolled past us. Ra watched them from the corner of her eye until they were by us. She turned to me.

"I wondered when you first contacted me if that was the arrangement you were looking for."

"It worried you?" I asked.

"It amused me." She winked, reaching over to squeeze my wrist.

We walked in silence for a while. Along the Prado they used to sell slaves on the auction block. Before Fidel, when segregation was in full swing, the Cuban apartheid meant many clubs and parks still refused black Cubans entry. Famously even President Batista couldn't gain membership to a country club because he wasn't white enough.

"How many boyfriends do you have now?"

"Que va! I'm innocent. So dime. Before you drag me to this boxing match I would like to know what movies do they like where you're from, Brinicito."

"Superheroes and comic book stuff are the most popular. Hollywood makes a lot of movies about America being attacked or blowing itself up that people seem to enjoy watching. Distraction. Escape."

"They're sad?"

"Not even sad. Depressed."

"Movies to me are as close as we have to dreams. What do they wish to dream about where you're from? Por ejemplo, what is the most popular movie of all time in Gringolandia?"

"t.i.tanic made the most money."

"I saw it. We get pirated DVDs of American movies from the black market."

"What did you think of it?"

"t.i.tanic doesn't sound like escape or distraction to me. Fidel loved the film Jaws. He said it was capitalism attacking every citizen with nowhere to hide. I'm sure Fidel would say t.i.tanic describes a lot about America."

"The doomed, supposedly unsinkable ship?"

"Bah!" Ra slapped my arm. "Forget politics. Emotionally. Existentially. There's poetry in what that ship's failed journey meant. Have you read Neruda?"

"Listen," I said. "Forget Pablo Neruda and start talking about Leonardo Di-f.u.c.king-Caprio."