The Parque Mátires ’71 is pleasant, nothing special, hardly distinguishable from dozens of other little parks in Old Havana. Fairly safe, reasonably clean, shabby, some tatty greenery and a few trees, a bird-limed bronze statue to a forgotten hero, and rickety park benches around a stone-paved terrace. I was perched on the more stable slats of one of these in the late afternoon sunshine, and reading Romola. This was not as incongruous as it sounds, for the massive novel is George Eliot’s attempt to recreate a world far from her native English Midlands: the smells and colours, the jostle and noise of the street in 16th-century Florence. Old Havana is closer to Renaissance Florence than to Nuneaton, Warks.
The heat, humidity and fraying attempt at municipal stature reminded me of my adolescence in post-colonial Africa. The sun was bright enough to read without my glasses. It was like being young again.
Engrossed in the chapter where it dawns on us that the youthful hero is actually contemptible, I did not at first notice that someone had noticed me. Around a bench about 20 yards across the paving a young Cuban family had gathered, father and pregnant mother seated, their son of about five and their little girl of two playing at their feet. Like most Cubans, the family were of mixed race, and seemed to be on an afternoon promenade and pausing here. The parents were affectionate and attentive towards their children, but fairly indulgent: there was none of the parental shouting and frustration you so often get when English families sally into public places. I guessed this family’s outing was a treat for the children, who were mildly excited.
The little tot of a girl, in particular, was in high spirits. She had a big plastic toy dog on wheels — a cheap thing — that served both to steady and amuse her as she pushed it to and fro. She was happy and engrossed: a plump, tousled, brown-haired, brown-faced, brown-eyed blob of a toddler, meeting the world. And her attention had lighted on me; maybe because there’s always something about a foreigner that’s different — the clothes, the face, the expression … who knows? She won’t have analysed her sudden fascination, but it had taken a grip.
I had looked up and began to notice her properly. She somehow couldn’t stop peeking at me. She’d play with her brother, or have her hair ruffled by her father, and then look sideways at me to see if I was looking. I had mesmerised her. Presently she seized the steering bar of her plastic dog and began teetering towards me, gathering speed. Parents looked on as I drew up my knees in preparation for a collision, but she managed to halt just short of me, squealed with excitement, wheeled round and ran away, dog wobbling ahead of her. She had invented a game. Back she came, same manoeuvre, halting as I pulled my knees up and grinned, then scampering back to her parents. Children love to scare themselves a bit (but not too much) and I had been cast in the role of Exotic Unknown Quantity, probably benign but with a hint of danger. I played along.
After about ten minutes of this she grew bolder. Instead of running back when she stopped, she paused and inspected the picture on the cover of my paperback: a boldly delineated Victorian painting of the head and shoulders of a pale, comely-looking woman, finely adorned. The toddler studied this — literally studied it — for a few seconds, then wobbled off again when I lifted my head from the book and grinned. New game. Repeated, this went on for another five minutes.
I was now studying her. She had not been walking for all that long but she was a proper toddler, not a baby any more: a very, very little girl, but a girl for all that. Would she remember? She was at the age when the curtain of our memory in later life — closed on the cot and the nappies and the teat — lifts for the first time; and partially but very selectively reveals a glimpse, a snapshot, something remembered amidst all that has been forgotten. Most of us can recall a few incidents from age three and four. Usually these stand above the fog because they’re marked by something vivid: a wonderful surprise, a sudden fear, a shock.
You will have your own first memory. Mine is aged three in Bradford, Yorkshire. We did not live there but were only visiting. Funny, what stays: a street inclined uphill with a house giving onto the street on the left-hand side as you went uphill. Downstairs in this house I pushed a door shut, not realising a little girl had her hand inside the doorframe. It caught her finger. She screamed and screamed. How clearly do I remember my own state of mind. Fear. No trace of sympathy for my victim but terror of her mother and her anticipated wrath; a fervent desire that my victim would just shut up before everyone heard. And then the curtain comes down again, and rises again on the sight of the Corinth canal from a ship, then an agonisingly sunburned four-year-old version of myself in Nicosia where my father had been posted. And after that the curtain stays lifted.
Wondering, as I played along with the Cuban tot, whether our game would be vivid enough to lift that curtain for her in later years, a terrible thought occurred. I could lift the curtain myself. I could make it memorable. I could achieve this by giving her the most tremendous fright — say, by lunging at her, roaring and pulling a horrible face. Of course I never would have and was not remotely contemplating it, but I could. If I chose, I had it in my power to reach past all the years that lay between this child’s infancy and the mature woman that she might become, and, breaking through the fog, thrust before that woman’s mind an image of myself as the first stranger she remembered, because he had frightened her so. I could invade her memory now, at this moment in Havana in 2013, and capture and hold territory until near the end of the century: capture it from oblivion.
But I smiled, and she smiled, and toddled away pushing her dog back to her parents, who had called and were rising to go. I had forsaken my place in her memory.
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