I’m feeling today like I might disappear. Silent and remote. An image comes into my head – I look for it before I start. It’s a photograph of the actress Cookie Mueller, lying sick on her bed, being nursed through her final illness by ex-lover Sharon. On the wall is a picture of Cookie gettting married – to the man she left Sharon for, and who pre-deceased her of Aids.

Sharon nursing Cookie on her bed (Nan Goldin)

I look at this for a while. It gives me the right feeling, one I can not yet give words.

I start by hand-writing out chunks of text from my notebook: bits that leap off the page. These give me the emotional key to the story: ‘I sleep on the street if I have to … There were too many drunk people shouting, and Spanish exhausted me … At 3am I woke up and he was putting on his shoes saying: “We’re going. We’re leaving, going back to Havana” … I am not hungry. I want to go. I don’t want to eat anything else; no more meat. I just can’t eat any more. I won’t.’

I waver over some bits: how far into the personal should I go? I’m mining for the emotional truth but it’s fiction, not a journal. I reject passages that seem intimate but trivial, or too reflective. What I want is interior, but story – filtered through my narrator’s heart.

In the current draft of The Party, my Cuban friend Charo cries when the guests leave without eating the meat his cousin has bought. But my notebook tells a different story. There was a whole tussle between us – and only then did he cry: ‘I said I wanted to go back to Nelida’s and Charo got annoyed. I tried to explain how tired I was but he said that here in Cuba when you got to a party it’s for all night. Then I heard him telling Sandra we needed a taxi to Vedado so I finally got up and went into the bedroom and told her we were staying. I said Charo had drunk too much and Sandra said he’d told them this place wasn’t comfortable enough for me. So I said this wasn’t true and she dragged Charo into the bedroom to speak to him. He denied he’d said it and started to cry.’

'Here in Cuba, when you go to a party, it's for all the night.' (Claire Elliot)

The party was a drunken chaos. This comes across clearly from the notebook, whereas the final draft has only a few discrete references to ‘drinking rum’. My original words betray my confusion: ‘Lazaro grabbed me and motioned to Charo with two fingers next to each other. A question: “I need a girlfriend”. He leered at me, his eyes red and bloodshot. Earlier, his grace while dancing was lovely. Now he made me sick.’ I want the language of The Party, the narrator’s fractured report of what is going on, to mirror her dismay.

I begin to hear my story’s voice. I think of Jane Bowles, of How to Breathe Under Water – first-person, intimate work where the narrator has the courage to show who she is. I can get that close – why not? You always worry how much the reader will think a first-person narrator is ‘you’. But this is what the story needs.

So now I have two parallel versions of The Party: my current draft, and the mined bits from the notebook of the time. I type both out, then cut them into scenes, which I lay out on the floor, slotting the versions together. I do this quickly. At this point it’s not words; it’s a shape.
I make a shape. It’s all in the right place now.

I realise that the feeling Nan Goldin’s picture evoked, the one that resonated within me, was of self-effacement. Humility and courage. This is how the Cubans lived.

I realise that what resonates within you is the story waiting to be born. Before the story, comes its feeling, which you can not distinguish from your own.

Tags: Cuba, Leila Segal, short stories

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