The Times Magazine 41place of powerlessness, and they were troubles
that would have broken me like a twig.
As I began to understand Spanish, the
voices on the street took shape and form. I was
startled by the brute honesty. One woman
would tell another that she was putting on
weight and would be met with a laugh rather
than fury. I heard a discussion about the
caminao de verano, the “summer walk”, when
flesh is so sweaty you need to waddle.
Recently, in the chemist, a pharmacist
was asked by a woman for a pregnancy test
and replied, in front of the whole queue, “Oh
muchacha [girl], I sympathise. In this lockdown,
all my husband wants to do is f***.”
Such voices buffeted me as I walked, as did
the music – son, rumba, trova, reggaeton and,
disturbingly often, Celine Dion. Some weeks
after arriving, Camila took me to see Silvio
Rodríguez perform a free concert in a poor
barrio at the furthest edges of the city. She
believed that listening to Cuba’s most famous
troubadour would aid my comprehension.
On the way back we sat on the bandstand
in John Lennon Park, by a bronze statue of the
Beatle lounging on a bench, out in the dark
night. “I learnt to speak English listening to
the Beatles,” Camila said, and then she began,
very quietly, to sing Penny Lane. My plan to
leave Cuba after three months crumbled.
The stories Camila liked to hear were
not about my fancy life in London, but
about growing up in the Highlands, where my
parents had been farmers. I told her about
buying sheep at Dingwall mart and raising
ducks, but there were stories I didn’t tell, at
least at first.
I was sent away to school when I was eight.
There, a teacher said I needed one-on-one
lessons, which he used to sexually abuse me.
The experience derailed me and school
became a struggle. In secondary school I was
bullied – my schoolmates, scenting damage,
would play a game that involved hunting me
through the woods – and so I left at 16, and
my formal education ended. Shortly after that,
I lost both my parents to cancer.
To use a truth worn to cliché, books were my
escape. In among the novels was nonfiction
by journalists such as Tom Wolfe, Martha
Gellhorn, Hunter S Thompson and Ryszard
Kapuscinski. These people, I noticed, travelled
and answered to no one. For me, journalism
was less a vocation than a vanishing act.
Once out in the world, I felt free. I was
posted to North America and then South
Africa, where no one leant in and said, in that
chilling Scottish phrase, “I kent yer faither”
(I know who you are). I reinvented myself.
Just in case a tear is beginning to form in
your eye, let me wipe it away. I still keep food
on the table by travelling, or did until the virus
hit. Editors pay me to go on grand adventures.
I have learned to lasso feral bulls in Chile,
scoured the high plains of Bhutan for a rare
blue poppy and Camila took me to Haiti so we
could see the sites of her favourite revolution.
Cuba became the base from which I could
sally forth, still a wanderer. Now, though,
Covid-19 has forced me to stay, and into a
degree of reflection. My musing was thrown
into focus by the words of Keith Biles, a
resident of the Falkland Islands, quoted
in a recent New Yorker article. He and his
wife had lived all over the world, he said, and
“had no roots anywhere” and so had decided
to stay there.
That shook me, the realisation that out
there are all these other restless people who
struggle to tether anywhere. For the first time,
“Don’t do what the bastards expect” felt like
cover for a refusal to settle. The words of a
former girlfriend, arrowed back at me as she
went out the door, came to me: “Do you really
want to die alone?”
Just before the lockdown, I took Camila
to the Scottish Highlands. Midwinter wasn’t
the best time to go. The farm is long gone. In
the main, she marvelled at the abundance of
water and lack of daylight. Still, I showed her
the landscape, the rocks and trees, which I can
recall better than most faces.
It was quite a contrast to her small rooftop
apartment beside the Gulf Stream, where we
now live and have spent the months of the
virus. In the flat below, her parents tend toher ailing grandmother. Her sister and boyfriend
are renovating a place across the hall. There’s
no escaping Camila’s past – it’s all around.
I thought I’d struggle. Comfortable in my
own company, I can be restless in others’. In
such a family embrace, every instinct to flee
should be kicking in.
Camila grew up in what was euphemistically
called the “special period in the time of peace”,
when, following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, food grew so scarce that it was difficult,
in the words of my friend Tomas, “to get
through with dignity”. Family photographs
from the time show happy, fed children
surrounded by skin-and-bone parents.
Without its tourists, the Cuban economy
is crumbling again. A government minister
suggested we eat tripe. Like all the Cubans
whose stories I have heard, Camila’s extended
family is having to work together to keep better
options on the table. Whatever comes in is
split and part is packed off to friends and
relatives. Others send what they can spare: milk,
pork, eggs, mangos or, holiest of holies, chicken.
In the special period, Camila’s father,
also an academic, would travel abroad to
give lectures. When he returned, he’d split
his speaking fees between the residents of
their apartment block. Such altruism, apart
from being a mark of the man, seems to
flow through Cuban society, a remnant
of the revolution, but one now being tested
in the long queues that have formed at the
food stores.
My book is finished and will be shortly
sent to publishers. It’s difficult to tell what will
happen to it. I keep reading articles from the
UK saying that everyone, understandably, has
had enough of listening to middle-aged men
like me. I’ll need to find a route forward, but
I’m happy with the decisions that brought me
here, whatever it was that drove them.
On the foreshore between drifting and
belonging, I sense I’m moving towards firm
ground. Certainly there is something in my
manner that suggests I live here. I’m still
teased in the markets – a woman played to
her queue last week by waving a piece of what
Habaneros call fruta bomba and singing to me,
“Papaya, tasty, wet and fleshy”, papaya being a
euphemism here – but the street hustlers have
stopped offering me rum, taxis or cigars.
Last summer’s hurricane season turned
out to be the most active on record. Storms
barrelled across the Atlantic, gaining strength
as they approached. Once they were in the
Caribbean, it was like being penned in with
a bull.
Laura came from Haiti, having killed 35.
We brought in anything that could fly, sweeping
small stones from the roof that could shatter
windows or bones. I watched as the sea turned
murderous, but it was too late to run. Safer,
I thought, to huddle together. nNicoll in Havana.
Left: Camila in
Nazdarovie, a
Russian restaurant
in Cuba’s capital