Private House by Anthony Hyde Read Free Book Online Page A

protest. Despite everything, we are still human beings. We are decent, despite them.” She exhaled another smooth stream of smoke.
    â€œWhere is your apartment?”
    â€œCentro. If you don’t mind, why do you need my address? I have no phone. I cannot afford one, and even if I could . . . There is one in the house, but people only speak Spanish.”
    â€œYou are very suspicious. You will not even trust me with the number?”
    She hesitated; then she shrugged, and took a scrap of paper from her bag. She wrote down the number and pushed it over the table. Then she said, “You ask me about the regime. I will tell you. Cuba is one hundred percent Fidelista—you understand?—but zero percent Communista. And now that Fidel is so old . . .”
    Mathilde nodded. She thought, I can quote that. I will get something for my money. “All right,” she said.
    â€œIf you want, you can rent a car. We can drive around. I will show you Havana. And you will see, driving, that you will come to . . . traffic circles? Where you go around?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThey can be difficult. They have accidents. So at many of them you will see big signs, posters, for safety. They are all the same. They have a big picture of Fidel and they all say Vamos bien ! which means ‘Go safely,’ ‘Go well.’ You know what every Cuban thinks who drives by, every time they see that?”
    â€œWhat do they think?”
    â€œ Why don’t you?”
    Mathilde smiled. She sipped her own drink. And then she said, “How much do you want me to give you for this?”
    â€œYou will decide. One hundred convertible pesos.”
    â€œThat is a lot of money.”
    â€œNot for you.”
    That was true, thought Mathilde. So why did she resist? Because it had all been arranged. Because Adamaris had seen her across the Plaza and thought . . .
    â€œI don’t have that much with me, anything like it. We will have to go back to the hotel.”
    They walked through the hot, dusty, broken streets in silence. At the corner of Cuba Street, all around the red water tank—drinking water was trucked here, then carried home in buckets—children were playing in a vast muddy puddle. Women were lining up at the government store, with their ration books. In the little market, three stalls displayed a few fruits and vegetables, onions, yucca, watermelon in slices. The hotel lobby was dark and cool, a different world altogether, the art deco columns rising toward the elaborate ceiling, with the stained glass dome in the roof high above. Adamaris stopped by a couch. “I will have to wait here. They don’t let Cubans into the rooms.”
    Mathilde knew this, although the eyes of the three uniformed men in the lobby, the protección , were always discreet. It was another humiliation for the Cubans: in their own city, doors were barred to them, in a kind of apartheid. She went up in the elevator. She had an “inside” room, with no windows, but it was dark and cool and always quiet. She switched on the lights. She was alone: it was a shock—she realized now how strong a personality Adamaris really was. How much to give her? Fifty was surely enough—she could live on it a month. Two. And she had that much in her wallet, she wouldn’t have to open the room safe.
    Deciding to go, she turned around, to switch off the light—but was struck by a sharp pain in her abdomen. What was that? Not herstomach. It came again and she closed her eyes. Her uterus . . . something there. Not her stomach . . . She waited by the door. It passed off, and she went down the stairs, sliding her hand down the curving marble rail.
    Adamaris was sitting on the sofa, primly, upright, on the edge; and Mathilde now recalled what she’d thought watching the quinces girls, her sense during these past days that Cuban women belonged to some category of sex to which her own admission was not