In the Alcove of Trimalchio:
A Polemic on Modern Ethics and Etiquette, or…
I shouldn’t be writing this story. No one should. But since you’re here, and you’ve got enough time to kill to consider reading a story about Slovenian and Cuban pettiness, hear me out. Me and you have officially crossed the line of intimacy.
It’s my second day in Cuba, imagine, and I’m still not sure if I’m awake. My father has no understanding for my state, having lived here for twelve years already. Not even the daily screech of the 5a.m. ‘panadero’, at a time when a panadero is literally the last thing I need, doesn’t disturb him. Meanwhile, parts of my brain are taking turns in staying alert.
Today we’re going to sail on a friend’s boat, with the host and two other Slovenian tourists; a form of leisure most strictly forbidden to the locals.
We were told to be ready at half past eight, and yet at 8:05, a man surprised we’re not entirely psychic whistles on the porch while I’m eating breakfast in pyjamas.
I’ve been fed up with Cuban timekeeping for about ten years now. There is no decency left in me when it comes to communicating on the topic of time. I defiantly ask the man what time we were supposed to meet.
“Eight thirty.”
“And what time is it now?”
“Eight o’five.”
I stare at him longer than I think this form of reasoning should take. He eventually mumbles that he’ll wait downstairs and I slowly proceed to finish my toast, in no rush whatsoever. I might a terrible person.
But the idea that someone is glancing towards the door, waiting for me to appear drives me crazy within bites, and I soon run downstairs towards the beaten-up 1955 cadilac. The driver laughs and utters what might be the only word in English he knows.
“Slooow.”
My father has made friends with him already and tells him I speak Spanish. The man is delightfully surprised.
“But we just spoke in Spanish for like two minutes upstairs,” I say (again, in Spanish), and yet, whatever this form of reasoning is, it’s worthless. He laughs at the punchline and gets in the car. Perhaps the statement was a quest to reclaim my own sanity, and anyway it failed.
Our host is a rich Slovenian, a phrase that didn't really exist while I was still living in the country. He’s a proud owner of a successful tourist agency that organises archaeological tours all over the world. My father and him became close when he needed his permanent visa privileges to import 65,000eur worth of building materials to transform his Cuban flat into a European oasis. If you’ve ever been involved in anything to do with Cuban customs or Cuban furtinure, you wil probably gasp in wonder over how this was humanly possible.
This man, Jan, is a person I can’t truly read and I fight with the idea that there might be nothing worth reading at all. I’ve only ever heard him discuss money, Cuban politics and former Yugoslavian politics. There are occasional grumblings about Cuban love, but nothing that permeates the superficial. Still, it’s too late to turn back and his driver, whose name is apparently Cerrado, whisks us away into the busy streets of old Havana. We’re going to Marina Hemingway. A single selfie in it would possibly be worth a fortune to a great number of Cubans. All boats in general are off limits to the natives, and ports are heavily guarded.
My father now tells me that our driver is also our ship captain. Yes, this will be the man trusted to steer a ship into the open waters and back, hopefully with the same amount of people on board.
To my complete and utter shock, I find out that he used to be in Fidel’s private guard, and an influential member of the Cuban intelligence for over twenty years. According to him, everyone knows who Mr Cerrado is, and the fact that he seems to have no short term memory did not impede him in his career.
There’s two more tourists, and while at the beginning of the story I felt they were mildly interesting, I’ve abandoned that belief. The only remotely striking thing they say is that ‘they only stay in Ushuaïa when they go to Ibiza’ and that’s basically an all-encompassing description of their being.
I should stop faffing though, because this is when it starts —
Cuban food makes me sick all the time. Foreign germs, unrefined materials. Who knows. This year is the first I haven’t spent 2–4 days of my stay vomitting and waiting to adjust, or die of dehydration.
When we arrive at the desolate Marina Hemingway, a first problem appears. I struggle to find a toilet. The two cafes that exist in between the yachts are still closed, and since I was removed from home in a hurry, I couldn’t ensure my stomach was up for digesting breakfast. It’s only day three and I still haven’t gotten sick, so there’s still time for the local cuisine to put me in bed if I’m not careful. Paranoia runs through my entire being whenever I open my mouth to ingest anything, even air.
The posh Slovenians point me in the direction of our yacht, which they say has a fully flushable bathroom. I am suspicious of it, but decide to take the risk and use it. The whole event is minuscule and it happens before Jan and his grumpy wife rock up to the boat. The boat is pleasant. This is not a story about the boat.
We all get sea sick on our return and Cerrado drinks about sixteen beers, suddenly becoming a fun, attentive and intelligent host. He nurses us back to health by catching fish and grilling them on a small portable grill on the upper deck. I have a conversation about my love for soya with the posh Slovenians. I tell Jan that I’m going to write about him, in one of my books about Cuba. That I’ll call him Trimalchion, because if he’d ever read Satyricon, he’d know why.
He laughs. He likes it. He didn’t read into the satyrical context of a freed slave who flaunts his riches wastefully. He just read about the wealth. Still, I like the feeling of connection and I cherish hopes that I might have made a new friend too.
Things are looking up for me. I appear to be living a luxurious life, if only for a day.
Two days later, I finally return to my family home in Viñales, and hold nothing but fond memories of our trip. It’s about ten o’clock in the evening when I recieve the call. It’s Jan. He’s asking me about my dad, if he’s asleep already.
‘He is.’
‘Alright, listen. Tell him I need to talk to him in the morning.’
And then he says this, possibly the most devastatingly embarrassing sentence that will ever reach my ears.
‘You left a nice little present in the boat, didn’t you?’
A present? In the boat?
And no, I don’t get it. Nothing in my most peripheral meaning-making neurons could have imagined that my horizons on what is an acceptable topic of conversation were about to be expanded.
My wallet is with me. My jewellery is safe. So what is he saying?
He then proceeds to elaborate and in shame, I float out of my body, thus cannot remember the precise words he uses to describe what a mess I left in the ship after what he depicts as a disastrous explosion of bowels.
Then he asks me.
‘Was it you?’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t remember,’ I say. I’m not sure if he’s accusing me, or asking me to identify the culprit. There is no way of knowing what could push someone to have this conversation.
My moral sense is tingling. There are many issues with the situation, and as an individual who admires a multitude of viewpoints, I try to use the five seconds of silence to see whether I should side with him, or myself.
These issues are those that I could identify as indicating that I should tell him to f*k off:
- We don’t know each other that well and he’s putting me in an awkward situation over the phone late at night, with no regards for my reaction
- there were five more people on the boat, three of whom I saw using the toilet in a hurry, and yet he appears decided that I am the designated sh*tter.
- what is the actual crime? Did the ship sink?
These are the issues I can identify as putting me in a bad situation, meaning that I should apologise:
- it’s possible to deduce that the ‘fully flushable’ toilet was not as modern as the posh Slovenians said, or not even functional, and yet, I had my way with it. I was a sucker for not testing it first, like you should with all public toilets…
- clearly he’s upset about it, and I’m the only person he might be able to tell about this terrible experience, whatever it was.
- if I invited someone on my ship and they sh*t in it, I’d probably be upset too
I imagine how he must be feeling and decide on a diplomatic, therapeutic route.
‘I’m sorry your boat got defiled. I don’t remember using it, but if it was me, I apologise.’
He seems momentarily happy with this answer and he says it’s no problem. Our new friendship still has the potential to be saved. In a few years we’ll hash it out over a beer, but until then, I’ll put it to rest. I say goodbye by telling Jan that my dad will call him in the morning.
I can’t sleep. The surreality of an event so visceral that it could surprise a person who likes to think they’re unsurpriseable, keeps me up sweating. I reevaluate my stance on the human condition. Then I read twenty more pages of The Magicians and there’s still no plot.
What did I do to deserve this?
In the morning, I regain consciousness in a rocking chair, drinking my second coffee. The event with the boat doesn’t disturb me that much anymore, and I have better things to do, better stories to write. I decide to not speak about this to my dad, thinking it might cause a rift with one of his rare good friends. After all, it was a silly argument, about a silly thing, late at night.
And then I hear the rising voice of my stepmother.
‘Tell her, ask her, tell her, ask her then!’
I look up to see my dad, marginally annoyed, trying to get my attention.
‘Did Jan get hold of you?’ I ask. These calls are normally Jan or some other European connection desperately trying to get last minute rooms for a group of tourists.
‘Yeah,’ he says, and sighs, ‘actually, he was asking me about something just now, something about…’ he frowns at a loss for words.
YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.
‘…you vomitting or leaving hygenic pads clogging the toilet? Apparently Cerrado has been cleaning it for two days already and still hasn’t been able to flush it out.’
I gasp. Where did this come from? Two days? What are all these additions to the story? This changes everything. Why did Jan feel compelled to bring up this already disturbing event, sprinkle it with extra detail, and incriminate me in front of my father too? If what he’s saying is true, than it couldn’t have been me. I’m being framed for some sh*t I didn’t do.
Like always during my stays in Cuba, I am accused of being awful, tried and sentenced without a say in it.
The injustice burns in me as my stepmother retreats to the kitchen, thinking her own mysterious thoughts and I explode into a paragraph of colourful Slovenian vocabulary.
‘Call him back and tell him that it wasn’t me,’ I insist, but my father won’t have any of it. He thinks Jan’s just hungover and needs something to annoy others with. He thinks the fact that his wife has been ignoring him for the past six months might have made him sensitive.
But as a result, there’s a former Fidel Castro bodyguard on the loose, convinced he had to spend two days cleaning my excrement.
I consider writing a message to all involved, thinking about what to put in it. Would mere swearwords suffice in getting the message across? Could my father’s friendship with Jan survive if I went on the offensive and did something truly bad, like a tripadvisor review of his company (something contextual, like ‘he gave me and my family three kinds of gut parasites’)?
I decide to take the Satyricon route; the one whose ending is never found, but instead lies in the mind of the reader.
My strength lies in metafiction, so I ask you, dear reader — who is right? Am I too sensitive? Should I send the link to this story straight to Jan to tell him my side, and hope the special Cuban forces don’t dip my head into zebu manure on my approaching next visit?
Make your brilliant solution known, help save a life!
Comment and tell me what my next steps are…
I promised a funny story to The Goat @The Scene & Heard, and he might be getting more than he bargained for. Sorry I’m late to the party.
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