Escape to Havana. Nick Wilkshire
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He glanced over the empty seat next to him at his fellow passengers across the aisle, lost in sleep, reading, or conversation. The couple immediately adjacent seemed headed for a holiday and Charlie, envious of their apparent insouciance as his own stomach clenched, tried to imagine himself in their place. His gaze lingered on the woman, particularly the familiar way her hair was piled up on the back of her head. It wasn’t until he noticed her companion’s curious glance that he realized he was staring, and he was grateful for the interruption of the coffee cart.
Charlie kept his eyes on the clouds for a while, as he sipped his coffee and tried to convince himself once more why it made sense for him, the same Charlie Hillier who had spent the past fifteen years pushing paper from the comfort of his climate-controlled office in Ottawa, to be embarking on a three-year posting to Havana. The fact that heat and humidity disagreed with him would have to go on the negative side of the ledger, as would his general appreciation of creature comforts, like a regular supply of hot water or electricity. His never having been on posting wasn’t really a plus either, and the rudimentary Spanish he had struggled to learn over the past six weeks wasn’t going to be much help.
In fact, the Cuban posting’s only real asset was its distance from Ottawa. It wasn’t as far as Ulan Bator — his only other choice of posting on such short notice — but a Caribbean island, albeit embargoed and under communist dictatorship, had to be better than the frozen Mongolian steppe. Charlie would rather sweat, eat dry chicken and beans, and suffer through the occasional power outage than freeze to death on a diet of horse-kebabs. And while Havana was only a few hours away by plane, it was foreign and isolated enough that it seemed much farther removed from Ottawa; maybe even far enough for him to move on with his life. Maybe.
In some ways, he wasn’t sure he would ever recover from the shock of that awful December night. It was bad enough finding out his wife was having an affair, but to discover — along with a dozen other aghast partygoers — her wrapped around the Swedish Meatball in a broom closet was more than he felt he deserved. What Charlie hadn’t realized at the time was that one of the people in the crowd worked in Sharon’s division, and it hadn’t taken long for vivid descriptions of the illicit holiday hump to begin floating through the halls of the Lester B. Pearson Building, where he also worked. In the weeks that followed, he had felt cloaked in humiliation from the moment he set foot in the office, an embarrassment that was heightened every time he rounded a corner or walked into a room and noticed a sharp hush, a dropping of eyes, and a not-so-subtle shift to some hastily improvised conversation.
And things had been no better at home. Far from being repentant, Sharon seemed to think he was somehow to blame for all the fuss, disappearing in a teary huff every time he tried to discuss their situation. They spent an awkward holiday season under the same roof, barely communicating other than to engage in an occasional skirmish. Then, one evening in mid-January, they were sharing a rare moment on the sofa together, an after-dinner coffee in hand, when she told him it was over. It had been a calm discussion, and in retrospect he couldn’t remember why, or even if, he had agreed to be the one to leave, but he was gone the next day. And so, after fifteen years of what he thought was a happy marriage, he was on his own again. Well, not exactly alone. He had his older brother back East, annoyingly successful and the head of the perfect nuclear family, to remind Charlie what a failure he was. Not that he had offered anything but kind words and support on Charlie’s brief trip home in the aftermath of the breakup. His parents had said all the right things, too, of course, but it didn’t change the disappointment he had seen in their eyes. He had cut the trip short in the end, blaming an imaginary flare-up at the office, and hurried back to Ottawa. But if he was hoping for some anonymity to recover, it had never materialized.
Taking the passport out of his shirt pocket, he fingered the blank visa pages. In almost two decades with Foreign Affairs, he had never left Canada for work, and had always felt more than a little envious of his better-travelled colleagues (that is to say, all of them) and their stories of adventure at the far reaches of the planet, whether it was their participation in some treaty negotiation or multilateral convention of global import or the subsequent night off at the Bolshoi, or weekend on safari. Charlie assured them all that he was quite happy keeping his chair warm while slurping the stale coffee at HQ. He had repeated this mantra so often in passing up one opportunity after another that he had almost come to believe it himself. Eventually, it became moot, as the opportunities dwindled and he settled into obscurity at the lower end of headquarters middle management. That Sharon’s inability to leave her aging mother, who still lived two streets away, was what really kept them both in Ottawa had never bothered him before. It seemed a small price for maintaining a happy marriage, even though the old bag had given him nothing but grief since the first day they met, having made it clear from the outset that he wasn’t worthy of her daughter, and never would be. It occurred to him recently that perhaps he should have listened to her. In fact, in light of recent events, there were a lot of choices that he was revisiting, wondering what he had been thinking at the time.
Charlie put his mother-in-law’s wrinkled scowl out of his mind and flipped to the photo page of his passport, drawing a sharp intake of breath at the axe murderer staring back at him and remembering the day it was taken all too well. He had just received a courier package from his soon-to-be ex-wife’s lawyer containing their settlement agreement, his feverish first read of which revealed that it was the documentary equivalent of an unanaesthetized castration. Tucking the wretched document in his desk drawer, he had wandered the halls like an automaton, ending up at the official photo section twenty minutes late for his pre-arranged appointment. And while smiling was strictly forbidden for passport photos, he couldn’t help wondering what the photographer must have been thinking as he took the picture of a man whose misery was so obvious.
Flipping the passport shut on the hideous photo, he felt a distinct surge of pleasure as he looked at the burgundy front cover, and the gold lettering under the coat of arms: Diplomatic Passport. He had his long-time friend and former colleague, Winston Gardiner, to thank for that. He was the one who had engineered Charlie’s reincarnation, once it became clear that he could no longer stay in Ottawa.
Unlike Charlie, Gardiner had planned his career carefully, and had joined the executive cadre some time ago. But Charlie hadn’t realized the scope of Gardiner’s new directorship when they met over lunch early in February, or the power it afforded him to navigate the quagmire that was the departmental human resources system. By the end of their lunch, Gardiner had devised a plan for his new protégé’s assignment abroad in a fraction of the time it would normally take, in part because of a cyclical shortage of personnel available for foreign postings. The only tricky part, given the fast-approaching posting deadline, was location. Two or three years in Ouagadougou might not offer the restorative experience that Charlie had in mind. Then again, Paris or London was out of the question on such short notice, especially for someone coming from outside the established pool of candidates. But there was an opening in Havana.
As he stared at the passport, pride gave way to self-doubt, as he tried to imagine himself in his new role as Charlie Hillier, diplomat. Surely, even Gardiner’s pull couldn’t save him when the Department discovered that a middle-aged desk jockey with no relevant experience had been sent to Havana? He imagined the Canadian ambassador placing an angry call to Ottawa, demanding Charlie’s immediate recall after their first meeting. With his stomach bubbling with anxiety, he slid the passport back into his pocket and looked out the window for solace.
“Immigration cards.” Charlie looked up as the flight attendant thrust a four-by-six card at him. Forcing himself to examine the Spanish side of the form, he was pleased he was able to decipher most of the instructions. He had struggled for years to upgrade his high-school French to a working level, and he had felt some of the old angst returning during those first Spanish lessons. It didn’t help that his class of six included a cocky young trade officer headed to Madrid, who had the galling habit of chuckling every time Charlie tried to spit out a sentence. His neck muscles tensed as he remembered the time — not long after his passport photo was taken, as he recalled — that he had been singled out for the third person singular of comer, and the overwhelming urge he had felt to pounce over the table