Notes from Cuba

Sweat streaming down my back, across my lips, forehead, running in small rivulets into the small of my back. Chaos, lies and confusion rotating at airport luggage carousel in place of my suitcase and remembering (always remembering) her, how much easier, simpler to be travelling with someone else. I trusted her instincts, especially about things like the lies people tell about luggage collection at insanely busy foreign airports. And here, what, 7,000 miles away? here she is with me still, seeping through, present in all my thoughts from what to choose to eat to whose smile to believe. 

Cuba. Exactly as I'd expected, probably how most people expect it, but also all my preconceptions had proved wholly unable to imagine the blazing exuberance and warmth, the sense of at once just being somewhere, another country, and at the same time being nowhere my imagination could have foreseen or coloured in sufficiently well.

Am riding with 17 others plus our guide, Yuri, whose Russian name dates him at approximately 40 years of age, and our driver, the quietly stable Jose, younger, no doubt with a small family hidden somewhere in Havana. These new people give me another 'country' of new and foreign souls to learn. To carve out my place among, albeit for a short but intensely bonding 8 days. 

In both these strange new territories I have grown and come to know myself and my limitations, I have come to accept myself through a new lens, not always flattering but sharply truer than the self who puts one foot in front of the other without thought in my daily routines at home, work. Perhaps that is one of the reasons people travel or choose to do hard physical labour, it is so exposing and intense, like four cups of seeing and being squeezed into the place of just one normal, routine amount of seeing, understanding a new place, our beautiful world and variety of landscapes, foods, climates, and also the infinite and beautiful variety of others and of ourselves. 

I don't know if this is what others also find when they step off international jets, this childlike joy, this education, this cleaning of the looking glass, though  I sense it is universal. 

At the Eastern Bloc inspired hotel braced like an ugly dog over the lake, amidst the mountains everything, everyone, brings to mind a Russian movie with gangsters, all with thick necks, shaved heads and smiles which don't reach their eyes, acting as waiters, bellboys, desk clerks. They and their brutal hotel appear to have come straight from central casting. The cowboys, the street musicians, the eye wateringly beautiful young women, the big mamma with the sad, beaten but I'll fight for my family until I die eyes, all of them, all of Cuba appears to be from a brilliantly well rendered movie set. Everything is large or loud or stunning or so much a caricature it's hard to believe it's true. My eyes hurt with it. Everything from the humblest street and it's characters, to the architecture of the largest city, the mountains and beaches with bars staffed by people whose ancestors were Negro slaves, or Russian sailors, or Spanish traders, or from a neighbouring Caribbean country, all colours and combinations, they all seem extraordinary and unreal, it's as if the country is being choreographed by a sensory genius and just outside the peripheral vision a stack of cameras is probably capturing it all unfurl on celluloid. 

I'm now the age my mum was when she died, I'm doing this for her as much as for myself, to try to live as much as I can before my turn comes to follow her over the last edge. I'm trying to balance bravery and recklessness. In the past that's not something I've often got right.

I miss her terribly. Always always always. There is just nobody on this planet who I'd rather be here with, be anywhere with. I'm as tied to her now as I always was. I didn't expect that. I'm also stronger than I'd expected. I feel exposed, raw, true and my flaws are myriad and reflect back at me dazzlingly as if I'm in a prism, enclosed in this skin, this soul, as tied to me as hope. But I'm learning to try to accept it, the flaws, the not knowing if I'm doing anything right. I think what I have to do is keep cycling or working or walking or trying or being happy all at once. Just keep on living with whatever portion of faith I've been allotted, with as much dignity and kindness as I can, with as much love as it's humanly possible to breathe in and out. I am happy, very happy, if a little sore of heart and bum. 

I pluck hairs from my legs, my face. An apparently expert waxer without the wax. I think about the country I came from, about her. about my sitting room at home and where I'll decide to hang my Cuba pictures and whether my dining room would be more welcoming if I painted it a specific shade of yellow I've seen in a magazine. I think about home. On one level it is simple, some rooms which I own. On another level it is my foreign-ness, the distance, the weight of time which now separates and estranges me from my birth home, ever increasing and ever washing over me, waves of nostalgia shush in full of faces, voices, corner dairies and Roman sandals, and shush back out empty. It is my home, bones and blood, it is no longer my home and I don't care, it is, it isn't, I care and I don't, over and over. And her, a deeper primal home something in me is programmed to want, to need, to endlessly snag on. I think about home in all it's forms. The colour of walls, the structure of my bones, the structure of my soul. And there are three homes, maybe four, possibly more. As I spiral upwards slowly as if scaling a giant white shell, straining for the apex, I count them one two three, all are sustaining me, making me. Maybe I am greedy. Sometimes I think I might be lost. And yet, and yet, where is it written we can have only one home? 

I hope to be gentle and strong, brave and free. And I mostly am, except those times I forget to be patient. I am immeasurably luckier than my mother, her mother. I am not as lucky, nor half as smart as my daughter. Ever grander and more demanding than the previous generation. 

Today, by accident, I fell into step behind a young man, a boy really, of about 15 walking the cobbled smelly streets of Havana. He had a mesmerising bearing, walking tall and relaxed, like he owned the street, drawing gazes and many, many shouts of ola! and clapping joyous hand shakes, mostly from boys the same age or younger. For a few minutes, perhaps five or six, I was in step with a fierce and beautiful stranger on a centuries old road going to buy ice cream or take his mother some produce. And just for a moment before our paths changed I felt as blessed as him, beautiful, confident, an aura of mana as thick as a grown man's thighs emanating from him, making his life happen from the inside out, effortlessly clearing a way through a crowded street, my arms and legs sauntering in harmony with his, until I all but evaporated and for just a fleeting moment was him and loved him. 

Yesterday, by the pool at the posh hotel I sneaked into with my swimsuit under my clothes so I could swim and read in peace and pretend to be one of the guests, I watched a family of grossly overweight Russians throw their empty beer cans and plastic glasses in a wide circle while they caroused and swam and went pink under the sun. They are, my Australian friend said, used to being in charge here, the imperialist power, the provider of everything that isn't sugar or rum. Like any imperialist faction with as yet too little education to be gracious or respecting of their to-them minor hosts, they behave shockingly. It's like watching daytime TV. I think of the English in Africa and India, of the New Zealanders in the Pacific islands, of the French in Morocco. The historical balance of power is corrupt in those places too and it's deeply unpleasant to think I or my family or friends have ever acted like entitled spoilt brats in some culturally 'lesser' but sunny Archipelago albeit unthinkingly. To treat a king and a poor man the same, then you'll be a man, my son, comes to mind. Archipelago is such a nice word, five small syllables strung out in a curve, like a string of Islands in a turquoise sea. I wonder where it comes from, Latin? Must look it up when I'm home. 

I sit alone at a table for five, maybe six people, queues of mostly families stand and wait to take my place, any place. The coffee here is excellent and they all seem to know that of all the numerous cafés, waiting here is a good decision. I am not hurried, I read, I smoke, I stare at the people, I once offer, via gestures, the spare seats at my table to a small waiting family but they are not convinced, prefer to wait. This doesn't bother me but does make me wonder what they see. An older woman, glasses on the end of her nose, hair scraped back, reading, occasionally examining them. The invisibility of age comes to mind. Right here, in the shade of this cafe, in Havana, Cuba, in the heat of midday sun where yesterday reports of snow in England found me, I am not concerned. I decide to let the queues queue, to retain my seat, maybe order a sandwich. I am happy. I like being alone. Despite the setting, the fact I am happily alone travelling to exotic and strange lands, I am still bourgeois. It is a stain I can't wash out, though I've tried. It seems to lie in the weft and weave underlying everything. I wonder how it got there. Nature or nurture? And does it really matter? The more I travel or think or read, the less I care, the more gentle I become, including to my own petty little bourgeois self. 

Despite that, I can honestly say the world seems to reflect back that life is and will be extraordinarily rich and interesting. Increasingly I say yes to everything. Increasingly I enjoy my life like a child, riding my bike, staring at strangers, asking shockingly blunt questions. I have feared for some long time I might be autistic, somehow always wrong for my setting, and perhaps I am, but at this moment I don't care, I am free and life is wonderful. 

Today I wore my long black dress. The one men and women always comment on, though how a plain long sleeveless black dress elicits such approval is beyond me. It seems almost magical the way people respond to me when I'm wearing it. I wear it partly because it has this effect and partly because it's the only thing I have left which isn't covered in stains. It is, but being black hides them. I've been here three days now and I'm learning, they appreciate a certain sashaying here, what the French would call j'ne sais quoi, confidence, what Latinos seem to think is de rigeuer. They treat me much better, nobody hawks their wares, not one, I sashay down crowded, steaming streets smelling of urine and shit and coffee and rum and sweat and aftershave and I am allowed to pass. Because the dress is so long I can swing my legs wide when I sit for coffee, I can command my own small space. It's a far cry from the power of youth or beauty but it's still measurably power. Today I was immune to the barking of dogs and the need to take more photos, I had seen enough 1950s cars and shops selling Che Guevara t-shirts, I was merely walking from A to B, unhurried, unimpressed, untouchable. It felt really good. It felt entirely unapologetic. 

A child screams and 100 pigeons are on the wing, wheeling over Plaza le Viaja. I need a wee. The worst thing about travelling alone is not being able to leave all your things when you go to the loo. 

A stunning black girl of about 16 leans into a white man aged about 65 and tries unsuccessfully to not look bored. He moves his feet nearer to hers, til they're touching. This is rarer here than in Thailand, but it's always upsetting. I want to shout at him but I don't. It's impossible to be sure whether she has made a good trade, though I doubt she has. I want to tell her 'he will never take you with him home to Europe', but I don't. One of the quartet of men I traded prices with for two posters earlier said 'take me with you, I beg you'. Who knows. They all look stupidly happy, joyous even, as if something is put in the water to anaesthetise them. But sometimes desperation leaks out. 

At home, the landlady's mother tells me using fingers to count that she is 84. She has the skin of a peach. She showed me a photo of her aged 17 and I asked her to pose with it for a photo. She has no English and I have no Spanish but we understood one another enough. I learned she has a great grand-daughter whom she adores, that her mother died aged 40, as did her husband in his sleep alongside her in this bed. That she's lonely and her daughter thinks she talks too much. That she's kind and is desperate for a new wardrobe. She showed me how the doors creak, she showed me the interior. Spools of thread hung on the inside of the door, a small bag of photos lay atop her clothes. I barely understood more than three or four words in her ten minute soliloquy, but I understood the sentiment, life can be very hard and very long but it's not all bad. I hugged her. She hugged me back, she is tiny, like a bird, I was frightened I'd break her. 

Tonight, on my last night in Cuba, I met Roaldo, a Morgan Freeman doppelgänger and the man in charge of the city's oldest bakery. I had read in my guidebook that the street I was staying in was the worst street in the entire city, that I should never go out unaccompanied, and that after dark I should always take a taxi. So I decided to go out at night alone and walk the street to see if it was true because nothing I'd seen or heard or experienced so far bore out anything written in the book. I met Roaldo because I asked if I could take a photo of the nearly stacked loaves at the front of the shop and the man serving called for his boss, Roaldo. He was about 6'6, his eyes gentle and intelligent. He shrugged yes, I may take photos but asked if I might prefer to see the bread being made, and to take photos of that? And yes, of course, I would. He led me back behind the counter to cavernous rooms of stainless steel and tiled benches at which four younger men stood making different shaped rolls from glutinous creamy dough. They seemed as astonished as me that I was there, they fell silent as Roaldo showed me everything, talking quietly about the oven, which he opened, a cavernous blazing brick lined furnace reminiscent of gigantic pizza oven, and the sauna-like proving room where racks and racks of long rolls, short rolls, round rolls were being coaxed to rise, water pooling on the floor, the bread sweating gently in the mist. Roaldo said he is trying to learn English. He's already very good, I should have told him. The bread doesn't excite me to eat, all puffy white, the same rolls my landlady tries to make me eat every breakfast. But the bakery is interesting, the cocky young bakers gathered their strength to quiz me. Their first question, via Roaldo as interpreter, am I alone in Cuba, yes, their second, do I choose to travel alone, yes, rendering them mute, possibly pitying but also like a class of 10 or 12 year old boys, the jocularity hiding only barely their plain human interest. An interest we all share. Roaldo was patient, generous, quietly spoken, behaving as if this - a stranger who spoke no Spanish wandering round his bakery - was the most routine event, and perhaps it is. How much longer would I stay. I leave tomorrow. It was the first time I realised I'd miss this country. I've been longing to go home, I'm tired and it's expensive being on the road, though not lonely. My brother had asked me would I be safe on my own in Cuba. Wasn't I worried? Was I sure I'd be okay? And here I was at about11pm in a dark backstreet bakery, safe and inexplicably moved by Roaldo and the rising bread. I made sure to eat all my bread at breakfast the next day. It was good.