HABÁNAME, Chapter 9                                                   - 2 -                                    The dress, the handkerchief, the shoulders ? even those thick glasses are covered in such a thick layer of grime that it looks like she has been bathing in the Sahara. As Chela set her burden down on the desk, the caked dust on the librarian?s face rippled like aftershocks from her toothy smile. ?Che,? whispered the old woman hoarsely, leaning her tiny form over the desk for a quick but energetic hug. ?Magdalena,? Chela whispered back. She spent a long moment looking with warm affection at the woman who had shepherded so many of her youthful adventures in reading. From the time she could negotiate the distance between El Monte and Vieja Habana on her own, Chela had preferred the oldest of the three public libraries of Havana and she had come to absolutely adore the oldest librarian of the city. One of the benefits of working for Jonas during the previous year had been his sensitivity to the building?s dust: it had made him sneeze and swell up in hives like a puffer fish. Chela had therefore been able to spend time on her own reading after coming to gather materials for the Scandinavian scholar?s research. In a small recess behind the reference desk sat a lone majestic armchair, its carved wooden feet almost successfully resistant to the gnawing teeth of rats. It was strategically positioned under a skylight, which made it an ideal location for reading even as it bleached the color out of the ancient fabric that covered the chair frame. In all her years as head librarian, Magdalena had deigned to share this place of refuge only with Chela Stevens, and it was to this chair that she now gestured. Chela gratefully slumped into it, exhausted from her trek. ?Magdalena, I?ve brought my books. I had to move out of the place where I was staying and well, I just don?t know how long I?m going to be anywhere anymore. I thought this would be a good place for them.? She paused and looked up with a note of sadness in her eyes. ?Did you hear what happened?? The librarian sighed and shook her head. ?Yes, Che, ?Radio Fat Mouth? broadcast the news about the trouble all the way to the old city.? ?Well, I would still like to take books out ? especially my own that I am donating - but they took my library card away.? The librarian reached out a hand to stroke the young woman?s face, and her dry-paper skin dabbed at the moisture on Chela?s brow. Then she turned back to the desk, opened one of the drawers and discreetly pulled out a bundle of paper before returning to her waiting patron. ?Che, you will never need a card to borrow a book with me here, although you should probably not take more than one or two at a time so as not to draw attention. Things are changing, Che. It is hard to know who to trust. For the first time books are disappearing from the libraries ? I never thought I would see the day. Trust is important in another way, Che. There have always been some books that have had to circulate very carefully. And while it is the case that it may be foolish of me to do this when you have just been through this trouble, it is also the case that you need to know you are not alone.? She handed the papers to Chela, who looked down at the tattered photocopied pages. There she read the title, Antes Que Anochezca [?Before Night Falls?], por Reinaldo Arenas. ?Welcome to my very special reading group.? Chela cried in bitter silence for hours as she sat in the chair, turning the fragile sheets as if they were the shrouds of dreams. Although she could not bring herself to believe everything Arenas had written about the conditions that led him to abandon the island and ? eventually ? to take his own life, her own recent experiences bore an uncanny resemblance to much of what she was reading. There have to be exaggerations. I mean, the man not only fucked chickens, but he thought that Gabriel García Marquez didn?t deserve the Nobel Prize. Still, to be living among people you thought incapable of betraying you who are informants and to have the libraries and schools purged of lesbians and homosexual men? to sleep in prison clutching a copy of The Iliad to your chest to keep you sane and to dream of flying over the palms of Cuba after you have left in exile? to hear the crowd as it calls you scum and makes you a scapegoat?yes, all this I have either more-or-less survived or can see happening to me soon. So it is not just the life of the crazy Stevens family and of the post-Soviet generation that I have been living: it is the life of a Revolution long-betrayed and broken apart. My society is not a fruit that has been left out in the sun for too long, but one that has been rotting from the inside out. If even half of what he writes is true then the dream was sick even at the time of my conception, and the poets which sang its praises knew this. It is as Magdalena says: it is hard to know who to trust. And that is a very hard way to live. ~~~~~~ Chela did not care that the very air reeked of disapproval as she crossed Calzado Street to approach the U.S. Interests Office. She had just spent three days in jail and there was very little that could intimidate her. The van had come for her the afternoon of that wretched day Barbara was torn out of her life. She was not interrogated until the second day, and Chela speculated that the delay was intended to disorient her and lower her resistance. In any case, her tormentors were treated to a consistent and simple mantra for the duration of the nine hours that the questioning lasted on that second day: Barbara Murphy loved Cuba and had intended to stay, Barbara was blackmailed into an unfortunate meeting with a traitor that produced no ill effects for the country, and Chela was unaware of any other people involved in this mess. The one time she deviated from the script, adding a defiant, ?for all I know, you could be involved,? it earned her a hard slap that split her across the cheek. The third day was easier because it was devoted to what seemed much more like a meeting than an interrogation. Santos Valverde, Cynthia Richards and Pedro Guttierez were all brought in for a ?discussion? concerning possible security breaches involving the epidemic response team. In the end, the assessment of Santos the morning he oversaw Barbara?s deportation prevailed: yes, there were strong suspicions, but no way of really proving anything and given the dramatic contribution of the researchers to the well-being of the Cuban population it was best to minimize the situation. It was to be understood that for the foreseeable future, Cynthia would work alone ? requests for visas for U.S. colleagues would not be approved. As a precaution the two Cubans who had worked the most closely with Barbara Murphy ? Chela Stevens and Pedro Gutierrez ? were released from the project, which was in the winding-down stage anyway. It was the look on the jail clerk?s face as she returned Chela?s purse that sent her over the edge. The young woman, very heavily made up for the setting in which she worked ? the orange lip-stick in particular disturbed Chela in a way that sleep deprivation and harassment had not ? attempted to make a show of bravado, tossing the