Beautiful Soon Enough

Con un Beso de Amor

“I know this city. The tongue with which its inhabitants fool the sun.” —Pablo Armando Fernandez Con un Beso de Amor Yes, I’m going to Cuba. To make erotic photographs. I know it is not comfort; how could I write comfort; what to weave it of? I have no such thread, not now. My world verges on 1939, year after year. There is a Middle East, an American White House with war in its bared teeth, and madmen replicate in every country, like strings of paper-cut dolls. It may get worse. It will. They pretend to be happy? Maybe, they do not pretend, maybe they are singing in their prison camps like the rest of us locked up or not— And music. I didn’t fathom 122 berdeshevsky how loud. And I hear they dance & dance & dance. xoxox… The music is deafening. I’m assigned to illustrate a French woman ’s erotic storybook. I’ll have to shoot backseats, churches, and Lionel ’s bedroom to find lust, true and construed, in dust-drenched Havana . I ask everybody what they think erotic is. What makes them want to do it. That’s all I learn. The author says she’s an expert. A sexologist . I’m a woman with a feisty camera. —Suave. Suave says the man who picks me up in downtown Havana heat, distracts me from photographing bicycle shadows and gates and a sudden white smoke that looks like ghosts. He takes me to a next-door bar because he hopes to speak to a stranger and I say —Yes, ok, show me. Next we’re salsa dancing, and the musicians want a dollar to keep playing, so ok, and my hips work too surely, and I must be shown to dance more slowly, ok, from the belt down, la cintura, suave, y suave, ok. I might have stayed the afternoon if the nice man’s hard-on were not so obvious. I am heroically delicate. Middle-aged sophisticate. —This is a privileged moment, I mumble; but it’s just a moment, my dear, thank you for the dance. What else would I say? ok, slide away, looking for the ghosts, y suave, suave. But I will wish I danced tango like my sister Kate, while the erotic project pushes most of my buttons: prude, feminist, femme fatale, vagrant, voyageuse, so what? Here I go, I’ll never be fifty again. So what. I’ll have some buttons . Still I have no thread. Erotic project? con un beso de amor 123 So there will be naked fat women and voodoo at a distance and a boy with shells implanted in his penis for ladies’ pleasure. That’s the kind of stories the French lady has written. I’m telling myself it will be marvelous. The French authoress of erotica gives me a list. She knows people here, and how to take communal taxis and how to buy milk, or bread, or not-yet-rotted fruta bomba, pink as an inner-flesh infection. She gives me instructions for unknown locations and how to pronounce them, which I memorize. She talks about food. The cultivation of taste. I am a hired gun with a single eye. She tells people —These will be artistic, this chica is a fotografa artistica. Your images are so sensual, so passionate. So “woman.” She says they’ll all fall in love with me. I don’t know. I’m shooting from the hip. It’s the hour between dog and wolf. A mad voyant appears on the rooftop where I am waiting for the couple who’ve agreed to let me photograph them nude, in tantrified embrace, backlit against the polluted downtown sky; Havana pollution prettifies the sky to that color of the inside flesh of an overripe papaya. Downstairs, the sister of the man I’m waiting for is having a Santería purification ceremony. I am waiting on the roof. He leads the sister up in white, her newly purified hands highheld ; he leads her by one elbow; he walks her round the roof’s perimeter , her eyes shut tightly against the light that I am watching like a photographic raptor. Anxious. Perfectionist. These pictures are supposed to be in silhouette and backlit by sunset; I’m losing light, impatient as a cat pretending to be patient. He’ll be finished in a moment , be patient. I’m patient. And up comes...