by Wendy Guerra
They ignored me, argued about cocktails, name dropped New York restaurants, passed gallery phone numbers among themselves, and ordered exotic drinks. They ceased being present; they’d left. I was still anchored to the ground. I spent the afternoon holding the same glass of red wine.
I went out to the terrace, went down the steps to look at the coast, the rust-covered bottom at my feet. I can’t live without these places. All this is me; it contains me. What can I say to Diego? I don’t want to leave forever. None of my classmates tried to cheer me up; they were busy being happy. I wanted to continue my goodbyes, to continue mourning until I was drained.
As evening fell, schools of sardines drew silver circles in the sea. A humid air was blowing, overwhelming me. I went up to the restaurant again. My friends were laughing and sketching out installation projects on their napkins. Fishermen and simple people passed by and peeked in on us in our delirium. I felt guilty. I’m very fragile.
Something is changing, I thought. What am I doing here?
In the evening, we ordered soup and rice with seafood. Julio hugged me tightly, led me to the terrace, our bodies dangling dangerously over the cliff, the sea below us. Almost in the water, held back only by the window’s glass.
“I’ve never forgotten you, you know,” he whispered. “I don’t know why I haven’t tried to see you, but I feel like if I do, I’ll go to ruin. How about you?”
“I try, but you can’t live on past passions.”
We both laughed, hugging each other. We kissed, a tender and inoffensive kiss.
We went back to our table. Almost everyone was drunk, though I hadn’t tasted anything other than that first glass of wine. I’d just squeezed the lemon into my soup when our waiter came and asked us kindly to leave, right now, that we didn’t have to pay for the food, just the drinks. We were stunned.
“What happened? What did we do?”
We thought it was a game.
“I can’t explain it. Go to the bar and look at the TV,” the waiter said, picking up the bowls of soup.
The line to get in the bar was eternal.
“Watch the next newscast,” the waiter advised. “Fidel has resigned.”
He’d been sick.
I saw people with watery eyes, wry smiles, fear, strangeness, shock. I couldn’t see myself in the confusion. We paid our bill in silence. Nobody dared say a word. We were a group of young people born and raised listening to the same president’s speeches all our lives. Ever since we could remember, we hadn’t experienced anyone else in charge of the country. We thought that would never come. We kissed and said goodbye without questions. As we left, the restaurant was closing, the back doors and windows already locked.
We went in a caravan of silence back along the same 1950s road, but in reverse. We skirted the cold, dark coastline. On the Malecón, people weren’t staring at the water but at the empty city.
Once we got to my house, Fabián took my hand.
“What’s going to happen?”
“For the moment, nothing. Take care,” I said fondly, and we hugged. “I don’t know when we’ll see each other again.”
In the house, Lujo was pure nerves. He asked the same question, and as if an oracle were speaking. Again I said: “Nothing’s going to happen for now, so you can start by calming yourself down. Do you want a café con leche? I haven’t eaten anything.”
We drank our café con leches in silence. In front of the house, the same sea. People quietly returned to their homes, and that night Nadia, in her role as oracle, could not sleep a wink. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing: Diego, friends of Lujo and my father—they wanted to know if we were still alive.
I woke up several times, and at dawn I finally gave up. I decided to jot down some notes in my notebook. While day broke, I wrote: “In my country all roads lead to Fidel: what you eat, what you wear, the blackouts, your rent, schools, trips, promotions, demotions, cyclones, epidemics, carnivals, congresses, roads. Very few important things have happened without him. Today, sitting in front of the TV, I said to myself (with a little more clarity than Lujo): ‘Nothing is going on here but life itself.’ The streets are quiet, the people sitting on the Malecón stare at the city where nothing seems to have changed. Something is ending, but I can’t figure out what.”
My friends would be flying to New York very soon. My head flew in another direction. I had another pending matter. There was no time to lose. Death traveled alongside me.
NOTE
Lujo puts me in touch with Lourdes Argibay, Celia’s niece and friend for many years. She agrees to give us her testimony. The talk is emotional but calm. According to Lujo, Lourdes is who most reminds him of Celia physically. Writing a book is a serious endeavor, but finding the real Celia is complicated. She didn’t want to leave a trace, she’s been erased, and we vanish as soon as we look for her.
Letters, Letters, Letters
My dear Diego:
I recently read a transcript of the postcard Che sent to his wife Aleida March while at the Louvre Museum. I thought about sending you my notes after reading it. I think about the distant and cold hero, not the husband of that woman who waits and waits and waits forever, I think even still. I don’t know if that can ever be outdone. Now everything seems simpler: he’s just a man buying a postcard for his wife, writing, filling in the card in a corner under a yellow light at the museum, writing certain words that say I love you without saying it. He’s not someone I understand. I’ve been tortured by a misunderstanding of the hero figure since childhood. Every morning I swore (we swore) to be like him, and now I read this distant or endearing postcard from the human being, the lover, and I don’t know, I can’t know who he really was beyond his marble statue. It’s the first time I’ve had a document in my hand that makes me question the lives of these immovable beings from our childhood. My love, read carefully. It’s written on the back of a reproduction of a portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
My dear:
Dreaming of holding hands with you in the Louvre, I saw you represented there, curvy, serious, with a slightly sad smile (perhaps because nobody loves you), waiting for the distant beloved (is it who I think or someone else?).
I let go of your hand to see you better and guess what you’ve hidden in your prodigal bosom. Male, right? A kiss and a big hug for everyone and especially for you.
from
Mariscal Thu Che
Aleida and Ernesto’s third daughter was named Celia. My mother thought of naming me Celia too, but my surname didn’t match the ideals the name inspired in her. My concern for her, for the stolen novel, and all those other things haunt me, reinforcing an idea: I have to go to Miami with the visa and my grant money. I’ll spend a weekend with Celia’s relatives. I’d like to finish my mother’s book. I don’t want to just sit here; the journey’s already begun. It’s better this way. Lujo will call you and let you know when I’ve landed, when they’ve come to get me; these are people who’ve helped us a lot. Tell me when you can come so we can schedule our times and decide what to do with our lives. I adore you. You’ve given me so much strength.
Your Nadia Guerra
Nadia:
I’m calling you this afternoon so we can decide on the dates. I can’t go to Miami with you for the usual reasons, work. When you fly back to Cuba, I want to be waiting for you at the airport. Let’s talk calmly, and I’ll take you with me to write “your mother’s book” in peace. Don’t leave the phone off the hook. I’ll call you late, very late, at the end of my show. Kisses everywhere.
Diego
What Is a Cuban Woman?
As I prepare to pack my suitcase—it’s only for a few days—I notice the clothes my mother had been wearing. I wonder what we’re made of, what feelings I have about being who I am, about who we are at the end of everything. I open the suitcase and pray.
Swimsuits drying out in the sun, black tears, reverb, dancing a sad conga in flip-flops, rouge, methylene blue, house robes, fried eggs,
pain and forgiveness, a friend’s clothes, eyes made up in haste, clothes on a Caribbean body, lost letters, long hair in rollers, violet water, violet skin exposed to the sun, butter suntan lotion, carmine in the mirrors, sandals full of sand, a little mug in the bathroom for washing, suspicion, machismo Leninism, crying after an orgasm, tickling from sex, “Babe, do you love me?” Silent intelligence; cooking while barefoot between blackouts; legs extended on the floor after cleaning, mobilized, summoned; head wrapped in a kerchief; the battalion marching and almost dancing; a woman working with her daughter playing next to her. Listening to Radio Reloj reports while putting on makeup, laughing sadly, café con leche and bread and butter, a bath with white flowers and husks, eucalyptus breaths, rice and beans in the pressure cooker, to feel, to speak, to explode, a collective birth, sex on bunk beds, homemade sanitary pads, crazy academics dancing, housewife philosophers, Los Van Van, goodbye and rice, Caribbean-born Penelopes, a relaxed depth, fried ripe plantains, nudist camping, the black-and-white portrait from a quinces party, getting married in three days, divorce Cuban-style, happy tears, flowers for Ochún, desire, desire, wishes to be fulfilled, Russian boots, guerrilla miniskirts, ardor and salt, simple prayers under a cloud of speeches.
In the crowd we’re unique, first ladies lost in the rabble.
Journey to Miami
I was four hours early to the airport. I’d been warned the process would be long.
The bureaucracy was more complicated than the flight. So close yet so far. There’s barely any time between takeoff and landing; forty minutes in the air and we’re on the other side.
People travel in silence to meet their past or their future. Tense, thoughtful, red-eyed, and furrow-browed. Do they always leave someone or something behind? A child is crying. On landing, people crowd the windows to look out at a sea of fireflies. “The light, brother, the light.”
The sightseers disembark first. Political prisoners and immigrants wait for officials while still on the plane. It seems incredible that the paperwork takes so much longer than the flight itself.
No one was waiting for me. I knew this would be the case, but seeing so many people hugging excitedly made me feel a little jealous, a little empty and scared about what to expect.
I’m only here for four short days, I thought, four days under the gun. If I start calling people, I’ll unleash the past, so I’d rather just interview Celia’s sister, see the few people Lujo found for me, and leave.
My friend Raffaello Fornés, who already knew I was coming, was waiting for me at my sweet little hotel on the beach. He’s very discreet and only talks about architecture and yoga; he doesn’t care much for politics or where you decide to live. We had dinner together and he told me about Havana and Miami; he wanted to give me his perspective on both cities. We went for a walk in Miami Beach. The night was cool and Fornés was trying to evoke a bridge between the two shores.
“Miami’s not a city: it’s a region. It’s the second Cuban settlement, after Havana. And only forty-five minutes by plane from the most Fidelist island of Cuba. Let’s compare Miami to dense, run-down Havana. Miami’s the only city in the hemisphere where an unprecedented urban phenomenon is happening: it’s growing inward. In the meantime, urban expansion, like in North America, has invaded Europe and the rest of the world. Miami also has a great technological infrastructure.”
I listened attentively to his long theories about Miami and Havana: the yin and yang of cities. The Cuban part of Miami is a reflection of Havana, with the same names for restaurants, the flavors, the smells, people staring at your shoes, just like in El Vedado. We’ve built ourselves a small ghetto reflection, the city and its mirror, the expansion of another city ninety miles beyond the island itself, with thousands of replicants driving along the roads at the edge of the sea, perhaps with the strange illusion that these might end at the Malecón in Havana. If you squint your eyes and take a breath, if you listen to the voices and close your eyes a little, just a little, it can seem like you’re still in Cuba.
Walking Miami’s streets with Raffaello, I feel safe. In the days that follow, we walk to many places. We went to his house on the beach, which is very Zen, spacious, sunny, and essential in its decoration. Then we walked around several places I don’t want to forget: Lincoln Road Mall and the South Beach art deco district, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. I had to deliberately keep my mind open for everything to register.
Raffaello had a single topic of conversation: Havana and Miami, two points that seem so far apart but might be the same place.
CAFÉ NOSTALGIA
TONIGHT I went out with Pepe Horta, whom I already knew through my father from when he did an exquisite annual program and threw lovely parties at the New Latin American Film Festival in Havana. How could I forget his black eyes and his exuberant laugh, his excellent French and his pointed opinions on everything in the world?
As I was crossing the street to the beach, right there in the middle of traffic, his funny jeep rescued me from the lights and merriment of night in Miami Beach. Pepe is a friend of Lujo’s, and he met my mother during the hard years. Because she was younger than all of them, he remembers very little about her; she, my mother, is like a shadow in his memory.
Pepe’s the only person who’s done something really useful with nostalgia: created a place to sing it, dance it, party with it, and enjoy it. Café Nostalgia to feel, Café Nostalgia to relive—with joy—the past composed of each and every one of us.
When we arrived, the place was still empty, and everything smelled and tasted of Havana. It’s a casual, easy place that promises the best is yet to come . . .
The waiters are like a big family. The dancers, ghosts from the past, come in one by one. I know some of them by reference; others worked as actors in my father’s films. I also run into many of my friends; it’s Pepe who’s engineered all this, because nostalgia, when it’s good, doesn’t kill but sustains and saves us.
I danced with so many different parts of my culture: a little Afro-Cuba, a pinch of La Lupe, some arpeggios from Lecuona, the best of Los Van Van, Irakere, Elena Burke, all of it played live courtesy of the Café Nostalgia orchestra.
At dawn Pepe took me to his house, not to show me photos of my father in Paris, or to tell me sad stories about what he left in Havana, no. Pepe just wanted to offer me a Cuban café con leche with a pinch of salt before sunrise . . . When we woke up, we had breakfast together. His art collection is a real throwback to my parents’ time, to the Cuba I’d like to save from disaster.
Pepe has a very special project; he wants to sell everything, including his club. He wants to go live in his house in El Vedado with his mother and perhaps create a spiritual retreat in Viñales.
The previous night Pepe gave me a gift: he revealed the difference between nostalgia and melancholia. One is played with a violin, the other with a guitar. Melancholia pulls us to the bottom, but nostalgia is a stepping stone to the next stage in our lives.
This place could be that too, depending on the protagonist and her style when playing the piano keys of life.
It’s funny. Pepe is one of the few people in Miami who’s not afflicted with Miami’s most common disease: nostalgia.
At daybreak, Pepe drops me off at my little hotel on the beach, I go up the stairs, look at the sea, and close the curtains so I can sleep . . .
It smells of dry docks here, of shellfish on the coast of Miramar, of burnt butter at the playita on Sixteenth Street, of my house the last time Lujo brewed coffee. Nostalgia is an endemic disease from which I don’t want to save myself.
CHELA’S HOUSE
CELIA’S ONLY living sister, Chela, left Cuba at the beginning of the Revolution. Today she is turning ninety years old. Memories mingle in her head. She’s sweet, elegant, and delicate. Celia looked a lot like her sisters, so I imagine this is how Celia would have aged.
It was a coincidence that my trip fell on her birthday. Lujo managed to get me invited to her birt
hday party, and here I was. Cuba was very far away at this gathering, and yet it was the pretext for everything. In her short and scattered speech, Chela talked about her sisters; Celia and Acacia Norma, Aca’s mother, were special to her, and she spoke in present and past tense about them. There were many gaps, and little by little her memory failed. People clapped excitedly, celebrated, danced to Cuban music made in Miami and also to Cuban music made in Cuba, as if there was nothing unusual here. No blockade, no political discussions. It was a Cuban party in Kendall.
We danced until very late. We shared anecdotes, connected names, common places in Havana from before and now, my father’s films, art galleries, and well-known exhibitions. They made a warm place for me, where I seemed to have lived even while living across the waters. That night I was able to break the horizon’s line, where so many rafters, martyrs, heroes, separations, landslides, seemed to blur by the second, but then reappear when I remembered I was there on loan. Was I a spy? Was I just curious? Who had brought me here? What was I doing here?
Just evoking Lujo Rojas’s name helped everything fall into place, so the important thing was to keep on going, drawing undue attention to the crossfire between the island and Miami. This was the best thing I learned on this trip, to tiptoe, to try to be quiet and listen. Our emotions always go to where we’re most spiritually comfortable. Wherever they land, that’s where we go. Beyond politics or geography.
When dinner was served, a very elegant man came over to tell us about the black beans, and thinking I was born outside of Cuba, he began to offer details about the original flavors of the dishes, mentioning things I’d never even tried in Cuba. What dishes and what island was he talking about? What he was narrating didn’t exist. It was obvious he never realized I was a Cuban who lived in Cuba. That’s always a good question: What’s a Cuban from Cuba like? What are the differences between inxile and exile?