Tânia Ganho

Cuba Libre

1994. A trip to Cuba in the summer of the rafters. While Clara Camacho, aged 18, sunbathes in the luxury of a 5-star hotel in Varadero, Cuban families throw themselves off the famous Malecón on makeshift rafts headed for Florida. On a dark humid night, a beautiful hotel dancer, a mulatta girl with shorn hair, offers her a flower by the swimming pool; an armed guard watches her, as she writes down her phone number on a paper napkin. But the name she scribbles is her stage name, and months later, when Clara tries to call her, nobody knows Guerlen, the girl named after a French perfume.

1998. Two months before she is due to marry her high-school sweetheart, the bride meets a wordly man who lives in Brussels and has a flair for silk ties and a million-dollar suits. Clara was raised on a small island of stern and devout people, where women do not leave their grooms stranded at the altar, for fear of scandal. But on the eve of her wedding day, she is having doubts.

2004. Far from her island home, solidly anchored in Lisbon, Clara is still haunted by the image of the Cuban girl in a summer dress, whispering by the moonlit pool in an island of informers, will you come back for me one day? An unexpected trip to Paris brings her the answers she has been silently looking for...

Ten years in the life of a woman in search of her place in the world and her true desires.

Excerpt in English:

My name suggests blue eyes and blonde hair, little flowers, and pink, lots of pink. But it jars with what I am inside. Clara – so feminine. It was my father who chose it. I suppose I should be grateful that he didn’t let my mother christen me Maria da Conceição or Maria das Dores, or any other kind of Maria. It is my sister who bears the religious fervour of the islands. They called her Fatima, to make up for the pilgrimage that our mother never got round to doing. When she’s got me ‘off her hands’ (she means married, like Fatima), she says she’ll finally go to the mainland and thank the Virgin for setting her two daughters on the right track. In the meantime, she just crosses herself and prays fervently (“Oh, lead her not unto temptation, Lord!”). As Álvaro de Campos said, “they’d like me married, futile, ordinary and taxable,” but restlessness is in my genes.

Strangely enough, I was born in the year that Fidel Castro took office as President of Cuba, and the year Madeira became autonomous. Within two years, Alberto João Jardim had risen to power; and now, almost three decades later, both Castro and Jardim are still there, like features of the landscape. It astonishes me – that urge to maintain the status quo, that aversion to change. I have always feared commitment, which in a way is a kind of claustrophobia – the claustrophobia of someone who was born on an island and can’t stand perimeters of any kind. The idea of doing the same thing in the same place within the same boundaries for thirty or forty years repels me.

But now, for the first time in my life, I have taken on a commitment. I have bought a flat and will be in debt for years. When the last instalment of my mortgage is finally paid off, I will be an old lady (does a seventy-year-old version of me actually exist? I can’t imagine her.) I am in my new flat, with its vanilla-coloured walls, built-in kitchen and interior-lit wardrobes. It’s all so shiny and new and gleaming that it scares me. It’s not exactly the debt, more the order. I’ve moved from a ground floor flat with whores living upstairs and doors banging at all hours to a silent eighth-floor apartment in a neighbourhood where everything is enshrouded in uniformity – brand new cars, dark women with blond streaks in their hair, men with deck shoes and pullovers slung over their shoulders...

I look at the walls and feel oppressed by them, weighed down by a future of endless mortgage payments, and a present that is always the same, dull and stagnant. Once in my life I had the courage to say No, but afterwards, there was an eternity of silences that everyone seemed to interpret as consent. I know I’ve chosen the easy option. But now I find myself stranded – not in the sense of being helpless and abandoned, without a husband or children, but more literally, like a boat that has run aground and can’t go on. If I had an astrolabe and knew how to use it, where would it take me? To Varadero, when mass tourism was still in its infancy, during the summer of the balseros, the year of the great Cuban exodus – Varadero, which means “dry harbour” in Spanish, the place where boats are brought ashore to be repaired or stored. After more than a decade in the shipyard tarring over the cracks that had started to appear in my life, I still don’t feel watertight. Somewhat porous, in fact. In any case, my mother is probably right; I’m going to die with my feet yellow.

(Prologue)

- translated by Karen Bennett

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