I should have got the breaks twenty years ago. Back then, success was the works to me, the whole score plus the fanfare, everything I wanted. I was young, I was strong and I did not question. I took whatever was on offer and asked nothing of myself. Now I'm older and wearier and I think only of reaching out. But how do you do that? How?

I flew to Cuba out of São Paulo. My flight was the first one available. It was important not to have the time to change my mind. I’m on a schedule these days, anyway. A busy guy. A moving target. What a joke.

The plane was Russian and old, ex-military, I guess, the cabin cramped and gloomy. I tried to settle back and rest, to close everything out, but we were well on our way before sleep came. In a dream, I saw all the women I’ve ever known dressed in Red Army airborne uniforms and waiting to drop into a country too remote and too cold to care about. When I woke, we were circling above Havana. The scream of the engines sent a seismic vibration up through the seats as the pilot cut the throttles on our descent to the runway. The woman across the aisle began murmuring to herself, her video camera clutched to her chest.

The bus from the airport was crowded and the air-conditioning was fucked. A cropped-haired guy in a radio-active green sport shirt and wrinkled cargo pants almost sat in my lap as he fell with a grunt into the seat next to me. Sliding over to avoid the meaty dampness of his forearm, I was jammed tight against the window, my face, shadowy and hard-eyed, close up in the glass.

You’re a fool, the face said. A frightened fool. Doesn't feel so good to be on your own now does it? Brazil had beauty and beautiful voices, oh yes, but it was never going to be enough to sweeten your sad old melody. You made music to forget and you remembered all the more, valued all the more. Six long weeks of rehearsing, playing and recording and you’re still sick with memories. And now, despite everything, here you are in Cuba, part gumshoe, part penitent.

I was smoke and ashes by the time I checked into a hotel. In no condition for a reunion, joyful or otherwise.

Room was one of the many things my room didn’t have, but I was too tired to give a damn. So tired even the walls, papered early Vegas style in orange and yellow zigzags, seemed restful to me. On the bed, the white towels for the bathroom were knotted together in the shape of two swans beak to beak, the curve of their necks outlining a heart. A card with the hotel crest stood against it. “You are very welcome, I am Mariquita, I am your maid,” the card said, the ink smudged and the handwriting awkward and overlarge. Softened for all my frequent flyer miles, then annoyed at myself for being so dumb, then exhausted anew by my anger, I lifted the birds in my arms and placed them on the chair by the door.

I woke late and slept later still the next morning. A long, cool shower opened my eyes. But I stumbled when I stepped out of the elevator into the light of the lobby, everything suddenly looking just that little bit too far away. I was hours late for breakfast. I needed to run through my motives again, consider what I was about to do, what I was going to say, so I bought a map of the city from the guy on the desk and went across to the bar opposite the hotel. I sat at a table by the door and spread the map out in front of me. It didn’t take long to find the street. After several cups of coffee, I felt resolute enough for evasion. Jittery with caffeine, I paid the waiter and joined the flow of people outside.

The sun was relentless on La Rampa and, turning a corner, I calmed my heart in a dollar store doorway, the dark interior scented with chocolate, rum and cigars. Across the small plaza, a quartet of musicians, three guitars and a double bass, were performing underneath the trees in front of a café, tables filled with tourists in a semi-circle around them. The tune simple, just a few basic chords—a folk song, I assume. When they came to the chorus all three guitarists leaned in together and sang, their harmonies pure. The bassist, a leathery little guy who was having to stand on a box in order to reach first position, smiled down at his hands as he played, his dark forearms furred with white hair.

The house was in Old Havana near the cathedral and the governor’s palace. It was a district of narrow streets, of Spanish-style villas with verandas and red-tiled roofs, their facades painted in bright cartoon colours. I was still holding the piece of paper with the address on it when I knocked. There was a metal grill in the door at face level, the speakeasy kind with a sliding panel. When it opened abruptly I was taken by surprise. Before I could say a word it was slammed shut again.

I waited a minute or so and tried a second time. After a long silence the lock rattled and the door swung back.

It was dark out of the sun. Merla had retreated into the shadows, the door surrendered for me to close. Her shoulders were lit by a soft, green light coming from the room beyond. The house was silent and cool. There was a smell of flowers, earth, dust, old wood.

“Hi,” I said, when I was inside.

“I cannot believe you have done this,” she said.

“Neither can I.”

“You are not funny.”

“No.”

“How did you find me?”

“Your brother.”

“Luis?”

I shook my head. “Esqueleto. I haven’t seen Luis in two years. He was touring Japan the last time I played Paris.”

She nodded to herself slowly. I could see her better now. She was wearing a plain white T-shirt and khaki shorts, simple garments that had been washed and worn many times. She had cut her hair. The fingers of her right hand were resting on the oval table at her hip. There were flowers in a vase at its centre; sweet smelling flowers. Folding her arms, she rested her back against the wall. “He is well?”

“He tells everyone he’s The Great Leto de la Barca and one day they’ll be proud to have met him.”

She caught herself smiling and stopped. “Did he say anything for me? Will he be coming home soon? He gave you a message?”

“No.”

“He said nothing?”

I shrugged. “He only told me where you were when I promised I wouldn’t come after you.”

“You lied to him?” she said, her black eyebrows dipping, all my other betrayals remembered.

“I lied.”

“And where was this?”

I told her about Brazil. To hear me talk you would've thought I was describing another kind of trip altogether.

“Is Leto singing?”

“Playing drums.”

“He should sing. He is a better singer than I am.”

“No-one’s a better singer than you are, Merla, you know that.”

She received the compliment with a grim smile. Nodding for me to follow, she turned and led the way further into the house.

The room beyond had a high ceiling. There were sepia tinted photographs on the walls, family portraits, men with large moustaches, women in high-necked lace blouses. The furniture was heavy and dark, elaborately carved. The armchairs and sofas were draped with indian blankets, their edges frayed, their rich colours fading. An old Pickering baby grand stood in the corner. One of its front legs was an inch or so shorter than the others and the keyboard ran down hill. The tall louvered doors to the outside were folded back. Beyond them was a small walled courtyard fringed with trees and ferns growing from tubby terracotta pots. A diffused yellow light soaked down through the leaves, their green oiled and luminous, the worn flagstone floor shaded jaggedly with their outline. Against the rear wall there was a dried up fountain with a leaping marlin as its centrepiece, the whole structure crusted with a blue-grey lichen. On a bench an old man slept, his chin riding the rise and fall of his chest. This had to be the grandfather. The blind man.

Merla disappeared into the other room and found me a beer. She didn’t bring anything for herself. We sat across the room from one another, both of us turning to glance out into the courtyard as we spoke.

“Things are good for you,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Leto says you’re teaching,” I said.

Her eyes looked past me. Twisting away in her seat she crossed one leg over the other. “A little piano. Sometimes I sing in the evening.” It was important to ignore the curve of her thigh, the way the light from outside shone on her brown skin. “What happened to the Pickering?” I said, nodding toward the crippled baby grand.

“Termites.”

“Why don’t you fix it? Prop it or something?”

She smiled. “Grandfather believes in fate. Fate means getting used to things. He says the piano must accommodate itself to ill-fortune just as he has.”

I looked up at the photographs on the wall. The people in them stared straight ahead, avoiding my scrutiny. I was nothing to them. The scenes they were seeing had happened before I was born. “Your family?” I asked, aware she had turned to follow my eyes.

She shook her head and explained that the pictures had belonged to the man who had once owned the house, one of the few wealthy men who’d remained behind and supported the revolution. Now dead, he was honoured by Fidel’s government. Because everyone esteemed her grandfather and he’d friends on the city council, the old man had been given custodial use of three of the rooms downstairs.

“I’m not with Holly any more,” I told her, interrupting. I’d been planning to wait for a good time to tell her this. I’d been planning to wait right up until I heard the words coming out of mouth.

While she’d been speaking her gaze had returned to the courtyard. If she’d taken in what I’d said she didn’t show it. Part of me admired her for not giving herself away.

I spilled out all the stuff I’d never been able to tell anybody else. How I’d arrived home from the airport to find Holly, the kids and the furniture gone, the floors bare, not a rug in the place, the phone disconnected. How the only thing she hadn’t wanted was the piano. How it had been pushed into the centre of the room. How there wasn’t even a piece of cheese or an old lettuce leaf in the icebox. How both the boys, Kyle and Dexter, were at new schools somewhere. How my daughter Anne, now in college, refused to pick up when I called, treating me as though I’d murdered the family while she was away and left her to discover the bodies. How Holly was marrying again, the guy the son of a farmer who’d sold off part of his land for a shopping mall, the biggest on the coast, and harvested the sweetest kind of green.

There was the sound of movement from the archway leading to the front of the house and we both turned. Merla could see further into the other room from where she was sitting. She smiled and held out her hand. “Come, Billy, come here,” she said.

Billy appeared slowly. He was dressed in an old Met’s T-shirt and a baggy pair of blue undershorts. He was sleepy-eyed. His skin was tanned, his black hair long and shiny.

“Hi,” I said.

He ignored me and went to his mother. Taking her hand he laid his head on her shoulder.

“Say hi,” she said pressing him close and kissing his forehead.

The boy looped his arms around her neck and said nothing.

“Shouldn’t he be at school?” I said.

“He was feverish this morning,” she said, meeting my eyes for the first time. In the end I was the one who looked away.

Billy freed himself suddenly and ran across the room. “Abuelo,” he said.

The grandfather was standing on the step up from the courtyard, a big silhouette blocking out the light. Tall and heavy, he had thick arms and huge rounded shoulders. He wore a grey sleeveless shirt and his grey pants were belted high over his stomach. “Qué pasa?” he said, his smile aimed at the room rather than anyone in particular. Merla explained the situation in Spanish while Billy clung to the old man’s leg, shaking his head irritably as his hair was ruffled from above. She spoke of me familiarly, using my first name as though I was somebody they’d talked about often.

Gripping Billy’s shoulder, the grandfather, Tamafio, was led across to my chair. As he walked he held his other massive hand out in front of him, halting when I grasped it in mine. The fingers were dry and callused. “You are a fine piano player,” he said in heavily accented English. Adding, when I began to get up, “Stay, stay.”

Even though I knew he couldn’t see me it was difficult not to avoid his sightless eyes. They moved about in his head as if on some mission of their own, their irises a cloudy blue, sea stirred with sand.

We talked for a while about music, about the records I’d made, about some of the people I’d got to work with. Merla translated the occasional word her grandfather didn’t understand. As he listened his large features swayed from side to side like an animal scenting the air. When the conversation faltered, he smiled and spoke to Merla in rapid Spanish.

“He wants you to play for him,” said Merla. Under any other circumstances, I’d have said no way, forget it, but what else could I do? I had a blind old guy and a little kid for an audience and they’d already begun to arrange themselves on the couch opposite the piano. And this little kid wasn’t just any little kid. This one was as blameless as I was culpable. This one had the past in his face.

I smiled at Merla. “Only if you’ll sing with me."

“Why would I want to do that?” she said.

I stood up. “It doesn’t have to be about anything else.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Please.”

“No.”

Tamafio began to question Merla in Spanish. They argued. Reaching for her hand and holding it clasped between his own, he spoke softly to her. At first, she shook her head impatiently and refused to listen, but he persisted until the reasonableness of what he was saying appeared suddenly to overwhelm her. Giving in with a sigh, she rose from her seat and followed me across to the piano. “This is stupid,” she said, sounding like a teenager who has been made to feel guilty unfairly.

The keys were a dirty nicotine yellow. When I spread my fingers on them their receptive smoothness was comfortable yet alienating. It was like being expected to wear someone else’s old clothes, clothes that have been softened by years and years of use, by all sorts of experiences you’ll never have. Their uphill slant was weird, unbalancing, as if I was limping along with one foot off the sidewalk and one on.

I started to sketch the introduction to our old arrangement of Willow Weep for Me. When I glanced over my shoulder, Merla nodded and lowered her head. Turning back to the keyboard, I repeated the phrase that sets up the tune and she entered right on cue. It was as if a bright light had come on in the room. A voice can do that—her voice can do that.

Critics take away your life and give you a biography. You are who they say you are. There’s nothing you can do about it, like everyone else they need to feel real to themselves. Adding a vocalist to my new band when I left the UK and moved to the States did help us to cross over, it’s true. But, whatever they say, that wasn’t why I did it. New York was why I did it. I was having a drink between sets in the club opposite where we were playing and Merla was asked up to sing a couple of numbers with the trio there. She was beautiful, of course, and very young, but I’d never have changed my life for that—not then, anyway. When music is right it defines its own rightness, there’s no big trick in seeing it for what it is. Watching from the side of the bandstand, waiting for her to look my way, I knew I wanted people to hear what I was hearing and then have me to thank for it. You could call it a sort of greed, I suppose, although that wasn’t at all how it seemed to me at the time.

I played lightly on the Pickering, coaxing the mellowest tones I could from it. Like many old instruments it was wearily out of tune, its strings and hammers and tuning pegs worn and in need of replacement. Merla lay way back on the beat, sure of it, knowing it would hold her up. When it was time for my solo she came and stood with her hand on top of the piano the way she used to, although she refused to look my way. We finished to applause. Billy clapped loudly and joyfully for his mother, his small shoulders hunched and his mouth open. Tamafio called out: “Acabado,” and laughed.

Merla went to him and took his hand. “Now you,” she said, “now it’s your turn.”

The old man protested good-naturedly, acting as if she’d tricked him in some way. He smiled and wagged his head slowly from side to side as she took him by the arm.

When he was seated at the piano, Merla nodded for me to sit on the couch with Billy and then sat down herself in one of the armchairs.

Tamafio had a smooth brown skull and small, baby-like ears. Sweat shone in the folds of his massive neck as he bent over the keys to play. After a brief opening, classical arpeggios fractured by chromatic runs and Debussyesque whole-tone scales, he began to embellish a local-sounding melody I didn’t recognise, left hand striding back and forth in the lower register, the notes rumbling and growling. Bar by bar, salsa rhythms insinuated themselves into the bass figures, the beat faltering slightly before fully establishing itself like a dancer being coaxed from their chair and on to the dance-floor. Long inventive lines were pushed up a half-step then a half-step more, momentum created by chord voicings that were oblique and raw. If anything, the piano’s uncertainty of pitch made the performance seem richer, more felt, the old Pickering sounding faraway and forlorn, a soured echo hanging on after every phrase, the music given a poignancy, a truthful lack of perfection. When I turned to Merla she smiled at me with an intensity that was meant to hurt.

I hadn’t been aware of Billy moving from my side. He was standing on the step leading to the courtyard and staring out, his small hips swaying and his bare feet shuffling in sync with the beat, his head tilted in thought.

Afterwards, the old man had a small glass of rum and I had another beer. Merla sat on the arm of her grandfather’s chair. Billy was getting used to me now and his eyes studied my face as I took a swallow.

“Want some?” I said, holding out the bottle. He glanced at his mother and then back at me. When he smiled into his hand and shook his head, I felt like I was being let in a little.

“Come here,” I said, gesturing for to him to come closer. He looked at Merla again and, when she nodded, he crossed to me. I took the crisp new $100 dollar bill I had ready in my shirt pocket and placed it in his hand. He stared at it for a moment and then ran back excitedly to his mother. When she saw what he had, her eyes flashed in my direction. She made an attempt to take it from him, but he laughed and stepped away, balling the note in his fist as he did so.

Unable to see any of this, Tamafio turned his head in my direction and said: “You will maybe have time to listen to some of the local musicians while you are here?”

“Not this trip, I’m afraid.”

I told him about the States. About the work he could get there.

“I am an old tree with very long roots,” he said.

“Things could be easier for you. A talent like yours will always find an audience. There are good rewards.”

“You think I’m not rewarded?” he said, laughing.

“You’d never have to worry again, is what I mean.”

He frowned, his blind eyes trying to search me out. “And you, you do not worry?”

“Not about the conveniences of life, no.”

He shrugged. “But we have everything here. Schools. Doctors. What more could we want? We had none of these things when I was a boy. Last week I went in Earnesto’s automobile and the motor was so quiet even I could barely hear it. The seats were real leather.”

Wasted time makes me nervous. The only way I could see of getting Merla on her own, was to stand up and say I was going to have to leave, that I’d a plane to catch. Billy picked at the blanket on the couch as I apologised and said my farewells. Coaxed by his mother, he looked up at me for an instant and then down again. His long eyelashes and the curve of his cheek made me think of him as a baby, of how he had looked up at me from Merla’s arms like some flat-nosed little prize-fighter, his tiny fists clenched in front of his chest.

Merla didn’t go straight to the door when we reached the hallway. I suppose she wanted to hear me out. When I tried to put my hand on her arm she moved away.

“You’re not flying out tonight, are you,” she said.

“No.”

“When, then?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“And where is it you are staying?”

I told her.

“Not your usual style.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m thinking of moving back to New York and I want you and Billy to come with me.”

She stared at me. She was half in the shadows, light from a window high in the wall reflecting in her eyes. “You are a fool,” she said.

“The boy needs someone.”

Merla snorted in disbelief. “A father, you mean? It’s a little late for that, I think.”

“What did you expect me to do?” I said.

Her face came towards me out of the shadows with such suddenness, I almost lost my balance. “What I expected,” she said, “was for you to make a choice, for you to have belief, for you for once to take a chance on something true to you.”

I shrugged. “I did make a choice. I didn’t want to but I did. It was the wrong one and I’m living with that.”

“You didn’t make a choice,” she was shaking her head angrily, “what you did was to stay where you were, do nothing. You have no honour, no balls.” I held up my hands. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, all right?”

“Grandfather can make out on his own, I suppose? And what am I going to do in New York while you’re away, eh? Wait around, be another Holly, is that what you want?”

“No, of course not. With Holly it was a mistake from the beginning. With us it’ll be better, it’ll be like it was meant to be all along. We’ll be together like we used to be together. You can sing. You should be singing, Merla.”

Folding her arms, she accused me with the jut of her jaw. “You have forgotten about Billy already. Perhaps you want to leave him behind? Send him to some school where he will be taught to do and say whatever it takes just like you? What was it you said about him needing someone?”

“He can come with us. We can do anything we like. I’ll figure something out . . .” I said, my voice trailing off as I watched her turn towards the door.

“Oh no you will not,” she said, opening it and waving me past. “You will never figure anything out. Figuring out isn’t you. It means seeing how others see and you see only what you want. What is best for you is what is right. You want the whole world and you want to keep it in your pocket like a lucky charm. But you do not have me, my friend, and you are not going to have Billy.”

Wanting time to think, for her to cool down, I made as if to leave. The door was closing as I stepped through it. Before I could turn, I heard the solid click of the latch.

I stood for a moment not knowing what to do, my mouth open as if I'd been cut off in mid sentence. I tried to think of something true I could shout out to Merla to get her to speak to me again, but suddenly I was left with nothing to say, nothing I could believe in, that is. For the first time in my life it felt as though music wouldn't be enough to save me.

It was too early to go back at the hotel, so I began walking. Walking so as not to be alone. The streets were strange, real but not real to me. It was as if I was still trying to find my place, still waiting to arrive.

The air was humid and dusty on the Calle de Obra Pia. A raggedy group of men, Habanerõs, sat outside a bar joking and drinking rum. A fat brown dog lay asleep under the table. On my side of the street, a young man leaned against the driver’s door of a beat up ’57 Cadillac convertible, the white upholstery dirty and worn, the chrome of the front fender and jukebox grill flaking and the cedar green paint-job rusted to fuck. When I paused to look at the car, the boy stared at me through the smoke from his cigarette and raised an eyebrow.

“A classic,” I said, smiling and nodding at the car. “Classico,” I improvised when his expression didn’t alter.

“If you come tomorrow,” he said standing up and stretching, “I take you for a drive and show you the sights. Thirty dollars, okay?”

As I smiled and walked away, it occurred to me that this might just be the “Earnesto” Merla’s grandfather had spoken about earlier. The boy with the real leather seats and the motor so quiet even a blind man couldn’t hear it.

The Cadillac was the same year as the one Ossie Caxton, our neighbourhood “landlord,” drove in Paddington back when I was growing up. He and those who worked for him used to hang out all day in a snooker hall not far from where I lived. I was told to keep away from Caxton and his men, but I never understood what my parents were so worried about. Caxton was a scrawny little guy who wore glasses. All he ever did, as far as I could see, was drive his Caddy to the snooker hall and then home again. The only time we ever spoke, was when I hit a ball over the rooftops playing cricket in the street and he happened to be passing. Calling me over, he sent one of his guys off to buy me a chocolate bar. “You read that ball all the way, son,” he said. “Keep your eye open like that and you could end up making something of yourself.”

It was cooler on the Avenue de la Puerto, the sea breeze salty and damp. I sat on the harbour wall and looked across the water in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps even the Florida Keys. Hemingway had lived in Cuba before travelling the eighty or so miles to Key West. Perhaps it had been a comfort to him to know his old home was just over the horizon. Out of sight doesn’t always have to be out of mind. When an elderly couple in tennis shoes and co-ordinated leisure-wear halted and looked over at me as if they were thinking of asking directions, I pushed myself to my feet and continued walking. The palm-lined boulevard called the Malecon was further on around the bay. I paused to admire the curve of art deco mansions and apartment houses with their flaking pastel exteriors and ocean views. The big brass band of the easy buck had packed up and moved on forty years ago but here they still were, shabby but game. I was reminded of all the rundown theatres I’d been forced to work back in the UK when I was just starting out, of the dignity there is in decline, in refusing to admit defeat. This was where the rich and connected had set up camp when Havana was Batista’s open city. A city spoken of with reverential shakes of the head by the veteran jazz musicians I’d worked with over the years. A place where you could dance the rumba and drink daiquiris till dawn, get lost on some of the finest morphine and cocaine in the world, grow older but not much wiser at the blackjack or roulette table, buy a beautiful mulatto girl, buy two beautiful mulatto girls, maybe even take in a little donkey action in one of the brothels.

When I got back to the hotel there was a young woman behind the desk. She handed me a letter along with my room key. I could see from handwriting on the envelope it was from Merla. Merla who’d told me her truth and enjoyed the telling. For a second, I considered giving it back, explaining to the girl it was for some other guy, a guy with the same name as me, a guy who follows me around just to fuck up my life. But when she looked at me with a weary frown like the last thing she needed so close to the end of her shift was a crazy foreigner, I said thank you and turned away.

I tested the envelope between thumb and first finger to see how many pages it contained as I crossed the lobby. It crackled with every step when I put it into my pocket. In the elevator, I took it out and examined it once again. Up in my room, I stood it against the glass of water on the table.

Later, as I lay in bed, my eyes kept resting on the whiteness of the envelope in the dark. Sealed, it was the certainty I wasn’t ready for kept safely at bay. When I sighed and rolled over, I was conscious of the shape of the two swans made from towels on the chair. I’d mentioned them to the man behind the desk as I was buying the map earlier and he’d told me that all the maids took a class in tying them together in this way. They were a presentation to the guests, something to make them feel welcome.

“I thought it was specially for me,” I’d told him.

“But of course,” he’d said with a shrug.

I listened to the monotone hum of the air-conditioner and tried to find some music in it. None came. The warning lights of a plane rippled across the night sky outside the hotel window, a reminder of the morning to come. Then I’d be back at the airport again along with all the other people around the world who wanted to be somewhere else. I wondered, as I closed my eyes, how else I could have put things right, why it was that the touch of two people who have fallen apart can never be simple again. Why it couldn’t just be a touch, human and in the present, worth everything.

####

Tom Saunders lives in Oxfordshire, UK with his wife Jean, an environmental activist.

He began writing in his mid-thirties while taking an English degree at Kingston Polytechnic. Later, he went on to do an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

His stories have been published in UK print magazines Panurge, Acclaim, Inkshed and Voyage. In 1995 he was an award winner in the Ian St James international short story competition and his story The Philosopher Nabel at the Kaffeehaus Eleganz was published in the anthology Pleasure Vessels (still available at Amazon on both sides of the Atlantic!). Order through BOOKS WE LIKE

On the net, he’s been published in MindKites, In Posse Review and his story Brother, What Strange Place is This? was in Zoetrope All-Story Extra January 2000.

You can reach him at tomfoolery@tomfoolery.worldonline.co.uk.