by Amanda Hale

I walked along the Malecon toward the Hotel Rusa. The ocean was a brilliant turquoise, waves crashing over the rocks, sending spume flying. Flecks of it stung me and dried immediately, leaving my skin salty, sticky. This was not the grand curving Malecon of Havana. I was at the other end of the Caimán, the alligator which sweeps down from its northern tail in Pinar del Rio to the hungry snout of Baracoa, surrounded by mountainous jungle and, to the north, the flat-topped rock of El Yunque, a brooding presence shrouded with clouds—a sinister child dressed for a fiesta.

I saw something bobbing on the cresting waves, sucked in and thrown out repeatedly. I couldn’t tell if it was a pig or a dog; a piñata with rigid legs and inflated body. I remembered a dead dog I’d seen years ago, swollen like a balloon, the memory of it in my nostrils. I watched the creature for a while, waited for it to come ashore on the ragged tearing rocks that separated the ocean from the sea wall, but the waves threw and pulled with a great sucking sound, keeping the dead thing at a teasing distance.

He was late. I sat in the bar. The little round tables were dark brown, the bar a long slab of darkness. I looked up at the television suspended from the ceiling in the corner. The hotel receptionist slouched on a bar stool watching the afternoon tele-novela. No soap operas in Cuba. The only propaganda is revolutionary. Every morning I listened to Radio Rebelde, which broadcast old speeches by Fidel while we all waited for him to die. When I asked about him, people were silent as though struck dumb by the possibility of change. The Commandante is recuperating. He will come back. Cuba hung by a thread, every pipe springing a leak, every chunk of masonry cracked and crumbling, gashes at intervals on the streets where the inner workings of the town’s water system were revealed. The whole island was suspended in the grip of imminent death, as though a large hand squeezed its throat.

Amanda Hale’s first novel, Sounding The Blood, was a fiction finalist for the BC Relit Awards and was voted one of the top ten novels of 2001 by Toronto’s Now Magazine. Her second novel, The Reddening Path, has been translated into Spanish. A third novel, My Sweet Curiosity, will be released in Fall 2009. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Arc, Event, The Fiddlehead, Dalhousie Review, Room, Grain and
The New Quarterly.