Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer Page B

that stands across from a dingy, closed-off building under the forlorn legend R.C.A. VICTOR . Hemingway’s house in the hills is kept exactly the way he left it at his departure almost thirty years ago—unread copies of
Field & Stream
and
Sports Illustrated
scattered across his bed—and the buildings all around, unpainted, unrepaired, speak also of departed hopes. One reasonso many Cubans ask a foreigner, “
Que hora es?
” is to strike up a conversation—and a deal; another, though, is that they really do need to know the time in a place where all the clocks are stopped. Perhaps the most haunting site in the beach resort of Varadero is Las Americas, the lonely mansion above the sea built by the Du Ponts. Nowadays it is a dilapidated boarding school of a place, all long corridors and locked doors. The Carrara marble floor is thick with dust, and the photos in the drawing room are hard to make out in the feeble light. But along the mahogany and cedar walls there still hangs a tapestry poignantly transcribing all the lines of the poem that once contained the hopes the home embodied: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree …”
    It is that mix of elegy and carnival that defines Cuba for me, and it is that sense of sunlit sadness that makes it, in the end, the most emotionally involving—and unsettling—place I know; Cuba catches my heart, then makes me count the cost of that enchantment. Cuba is old ladies in rocking chairs on their verandas in the twilight, dabbing their eyes as their grandchildren explain their latest dreams of escape, and the azure sea flashing in the background; it is pretty, laughing kids dancing all night in the boisterous cabarets and then confiding, matter-of-factly, “Our lives here are like in Dante’s
Inferno.
” It is smiles, and open doors, and policemen lurking in the corners; lazy days on ill-paved streets and a friend who asks if he might possibly steal my passport.
    In Cuba, the tourist’s thrilling adventures have stakes he cannot fathom. And every encounter leaves one only deeper in the shadows. My first night in a big hotel, a girl I had never met rang me up and asked, sight unseen, if I would marry her. The next day, in the cathedral, a small old man with shining eyes came up to me and began talking of his family, his faith, his grade-school daughter. “I call her Elizabeth,” he said. “Likea queen.” He paused. “A poor queen”—he smiled ruefully—“but to me she is still a queen.” When we met again, at an Easter Sunday mass, he gave me Mother’s Day gifts for my mother and, moist-eyed, a letter for his own mother in the States. Only much later, when I got home, did I find that the letter was in fact addressed to the State Department, and the kindly old man a would-be defector.
    And one sunny afternoon in a dark Havana bar, so dark that I could not see my companion’s face except when she lit a match for a cigarette, I asked a friend if I could send her anything from the States. Not really, she said, this intelligent twenty-three-year-old who knew me well: just a Donald Duck sticker for her fridge. Nothing else? I asked. Well, maybe a Mickey Mouse postcard: that was quite a status symbol over here. And that was all? Yes, she said—oh, and one more thing: a job, please, with the CIA.

Iceland: 1991

ROCK ’N’ ROLL GHOST TOWN
    Even now, I find myself going back and back to Iceland in my mind, walking through its chilly, ghostly streets, pale even after midnight in the summer, and hushed, no dark to be seen for 2,400 hours or more. Somehow it is always half-light in the Iceland of my memories, and I am walking across empty fields, alone, the sun landing on the sea at 1:00 a.m. and then, after settling there for an hour or so, rising again as I walk back through the pallid light and hitch a ride on an early milk truck, round and around the cloud-covered coast. It seems as if I am always lost in the ice-blue poems of the Icelandic Romantics,