Live by Night

By then, the rows of tobacco stood about four feet high. Joe woke one morning to air so sweet and fragrant it immediately made him consider the curve of Graciela’s neck with lust. Tomas lay sleeping in his crib when Graciela and Joe went to the balcony and looked out on the fields. They’d been brown when Joe went to sleep, but now a carpet of green sported pink and white blossoms that glittered in the soft morning light. Joe and Graciela looked across the breadth of their land, from the balcony of their house to the foothills of Sierra del Rosario, and the blossoms glittered as far as they could see.

Graciela, standing in front of him, reached back and placed her hand to his neck. He put his arms around her abdomen and placed his chin in the hollow of her neck.

“And you don’t believe in God,” she said.

He took a deep breath of her. “And you don’t believe good deeds can follow bad money.”

She chuckled and he could feel it in his hands and against his chin.

Later that morning, the workers and their children arrived and went through the fields, stalk by stalk, removing the blossoms. Plants spread their leaves as if they were great birds, and from his window the next morning Joe could no longer see the soil, nor any blossoms. The farm, under Ciggy’s stewardship, continued to work without a hitch. For the next stage, he brought in even more children from the village, dozens of them, and sometimes Tomas would laugh uncontrollably because he could hear their laughter in the fields. Joe sat up some nights, listening to the sounds of the boys playing baseball in one of the fallow fields. They’d play until the last of the light had left the sky, using only a broomstick and what remained of a regulation ball they’d found somewhere. The cowhide covering and the wool yarn was long gone, but they’d managed to salvage the cork center.

He listened to their shouts and the snap of the stick against the ball, and he thought of something Graciela had said recently about giving Tomas a little brother or little sister soon.

And he thought, Why stop at one?

Repairing the house moved more slowly than resurrecting the farm. One day Joe traveled to Old Havana, to look up Diego Alvarez, an artist who specialized in the restoration of stained glass. He and Senor Alvarez agreed on a price and a good week for him to make the hundred-mile journey to Arcenas and repair the windows Graciela had salvaged.

After the meeting, Joe visited a jeweler on Avenida de las Misiones that Meyer had recommended. His father’s watch, which had been losing time for more than a year, had stopped completely a month ago. The jeweler, a middle-aged man with a sharp face and a perpetual squint, took the watch and opened the back of it, and explained to Joe that while he owned a very fine watch, it still needed to be tended to more than once every ten years. The parts, he said to Joe, all these delicate parts, you see them? They need to be reoiled.

“How long will it take?” Joe asked.

“I’m not sure,” the man said. “I must take the watch apart and look at each piece.”

“I understand that,” Joe said. “How long?”

“If the pieces need reoiling and nothing more? Four days.”

“Four,” Joe said and felt a flutter in his chest, as if a small bird had just flown through his soul. “No way it could be quicker?”

The man shook his head. “And, senor? If anything is broken, just one small part — and you see how small these parts are?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“I will have to send the watch to Switzerland.”

Joe looked out the dusty windows to the dusty street for a moment. He took his wallet from his inside suit pocket and removed a hundred American, placed the bills on the counter. “I’ll be back in two hours. Have a diagnosis by then.”

“A what?”

“Tell me if it’ll need to go to Switzerland by then.”

“Yes, senor. Yes.”

He left the shop and found himself wandering Old Havana in all its sensual decay. Habana, he’d decided on his many trips here over the past year, wasn’t simply a place; it was the dream of a place. A dream gone drowsy in the sun, fading into its own bottomless appetite for languor, in love with the sexual thrum of its death throes.

He turned one corner and then another and then a third and he was standing on the street where Emma Gould’s brothel was.

Esteban had given him the address more than a year ago now, on the night before that bloody day with Albert White and Maso and Digger and poor Sal and Lefty and Carmine. He supposed he’d known he was coming here since he’d left the house yesterday, but he hadn’t admitted it to himself because to come here seemed silly and frivolous, and very little of him remained frivolous.

A woman stood out front, hosing the sidewalk free of the glass that had been broken the night before. She sent the glass and dirt into the gutter and it ran down the slope of the cobblestone street. When she looked up and saw him, the hose drooped in her hand but didn’t fall.