by Ana Menéndez
The man took off his hat and nodded, as if unsure he would be understood. It had happened to her in Havana and Lisette had been vaguely hurt that no one recognized her as Cuban.
“Buenas tardes,” Lisette said, exaggerating the contours of the words so the man would have no doubt she was one of them.
He smiled. “¿En qué la puedo ayudar?”
Lisette showed him the map and pointed at the road that was supposed to lead to her mother’s house. She pointed to the block in the right-hand corner, where the road branched to the right. She looked up.
“Militar,” the man said and shrugged as if something struck him as silly. The notion of a military base in the middle of the campo? Her mother’s precautions?
He took the map and studied it. Then he turned it upside down and nodded, smiling, to point where she was. If she continued this way past the small cane refinery and turned right on the first main road, she would pass the military installation on her right. Then if she took the first left, she should get to where she wanted to go. No photos at the military installation. He handed the map back. They’ll take your camera.
Thank you, she said. “Gracias.”
The man put his hat back on and watched her for a moment before returning to the road.
The military base looked deserted, but as she got closer, Lisette noticed one soldier standing in the middle of the road. She slowed. He was very young and held his rifle carelessly. She gripped the wheel as she came up beside him. Suddenly, he took a step out of the way. Lisette heard herself take a breath. The boy knocked his feet together and saluted. Lisette stared for a moment, then smiled. She thought of waving and decided instead to nod as she passed the boy. Surrounded now by the wet green of the countryside, Lisette doubted anyone had either the inclination or the money to follow anyone else. It was as if the whole country had agreed to stop caring. Only Miami still cared. And that made Lisette feel an unexpected pang for her parents. She took a left at the road the old man had told her to and began to rehearse what she would say to the people living there now. Apologies, of course: I can go away if you want. I only needed to see my mother’s old room. Upstairs, near the back, the one with a balcony with an iron railing and a view of the rose garden.
If they let her, Lisette would take pictures for her father. Show him the lost space from where his wife had emerged, naked except for her stories. The first years of their marriage, all her mother did was talk about her lost plantation. Her father told Lisette how she used to lie in bed giving him imaginary tours of the house. The graceful stairway laced with gardenias in the summer, the marble fireplace her father had installed on a whim after visiting the States, the long white-shuttered windows that looked out over the gardens, the mar pacíficos, the royal palms. Your grandfather was the only one who could grow roses in Cuba. People came from as far as Oriente to see them.
Lisette turned onto the first opening in the field, a bumpy road of loose sand and stone. The men stepped aside to let her pass. The landscape was green and flat but for the hills. She came to the end of the road where it disappeared into a field of sugarcane. And in the next minute, Lisette was pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth, determined not to cry, not now, not over something so stupid as the colors of afternoon. She got out and stood for a moment wondering if it wasn’t too late to drive to Varadero. Get a room on the beach, come back in the morning.
She looked at the sky. It had cleared and the air seemed cooler by the cane. She got in the car and sat for a while. She was hungry and tired, not herself. She turned the car around and drove slowly back the way she’d come. When she came upon the field men, she drove beside them for a while until they got off the road to let her pass. But she stopped the car and rolled down the window. She didn’t give them a chance to address her in English.
“Buenas tardes,” she said.
The men looked at one another, then nodded.
She asked if they knew of the old Aruna house.
“Aruna?”
The men discussed it. The man she had addressed laid down his machete and came to her window. “Santo’s granddaughter?”
Lisette thought for a moment and then motioned to him to get closer as she stepped out of the car. She nodded. “Mabella’s daughter.”
The man’s eyes narrowed before he turned to face the others.
“Oye, la hija de Mabi.”
When he turned back to her, he was smiling. He took her hands. “I knew it, I knew it when I saw you, the same eyes.”
“Lisidro Padron,” he said, holding out his hand. “El carpintero. Your mother has told you about me probably?”
The other men crowded around her before she could disappoint Lisidro. Questions. Where were they? How were they? Any sisters? Are the old Arunas still alive? Lisette shook her head to the last one. Died in Venezuela a few years after the revolution. The man bent his head. He motioned back to his friends. “I’ll take you to the house.”
He paused and looked at Lisette, deciding something. “El viejo Matún and his wife are living there.” Lisette shook her head like a question. “You don’t know Matún and Alicia? They worked for your grandparents all their lives, since they were children almost. Matún was the only man who could grow roses in Cuba.” Lisette raised her head and looked at Lisidro. After a moment she said, “Yes, of course, the roses.”
Twice in the walk to the house, she tried to ask Lisidro something, a question about the winds this time of year, where the road emptied. But he walked on without turning, as if he hadn’t heard her or thought her poorly bred for disturbing the silence this way. Their footsteps loosened the top thin layer of dirt on the road and sent up clouds of red-brown dust behind them. The royal palms had thinned and in between them, by the edge of the road, pink flowers grew, their petals curled under where they were beginning to brown. The air was still, the thin white clouds high in the sky, and Lisette thought again how much she often preferred the journey to the destination. Even when she was a girl and they made the long drives to visit her father’s parents in Tampa, she had reveled in the passing trucks, the outposts of life, the burger joints and the dried-fruit stands, most of them gone now, the road long since widened. But those early mornings with the stars still out, she used to sit in the back and wish they would never get there, that their whole life could become this car trip. She felt it now, comfortable in her stride behind Lisidro, accustomed to the silence, not caring anymore where the road ended.
Lisidro stopped suddenly ahead of her. He turned back and waved his arm for her to hurry. He stood in front of a little iron gate painted white. He shouted into a tangle of trees and plants. Lisette came up beside him. A slender stone path led from the gate into the garden. Out of the foliage, as Lisette stood watching, came a short woman, bent over, her head covered in a black shawl. She came up to the gate, resting a brown hand on the latch, and looked into Lisette’s eyes.
“La nieta de Aruna,” Lisidro said. “Lisette, this is Alicia. She and Matún have been here. Have been taking care of things.”
Alicia watched Lisette. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black. As Lisette watched, the woman’s eyes filled with tears.
“Yes, I see the resemblance,” she said.
Alicia’s eyes shifted down and a tear fell slowly along her nose. Lisette put her hand over the woman’s hand, like rough paper and dry as the road. Alicia turned to Lisidro and back again. She removed her hand from under Lisette’s abruptly and wiped the corners of her eyes with the shawl.
“You are here to take the house.”
The hardness of the woman’s words startled Lisette. She looked from Lisidro to Alicia and brought her arms to her chest.
“I swear to you it’s not that at all,” Lisette said. “Never.”
Lisidro put a hand on her shoulder and motioned with the other to go through the gate.
“La Señorita Aruna has no such intentions. She only wants to see the house. And then she’ll leave.”
Lisette nodded and looked b
ack to Alicia, whose hand had come to rest on the latch again.
“The resemblance. It’s quite striking,” Alicia said. “Igualita.”
Lisidro had to give her a small shove to get them through the gate.
When they came to the garden, the first thing Lisette saw was a rooster and then the dry dusty ground that it pecked and then a speckle of sunlight like a pebble and beyond it, above it, in a weak shadow, the house.
The house, the idea of her mother’s house there in the shadow, is a present thought in this retelling, the way she described it to herself much later. Back then, standing next to Lisidro and Alicia, Lisette saw that it was a house, but it could not be the house she had come all this way to see. This was a house with small windows carved high on the uneven walls. A flat, pitted roof of red tile. A single front door, wooden and cracked. An iron latch that hung open. A house with small windows. Uneven walls. Red tiles. Iron latches. The house of someone else’s imaginings, a different story. Beyond the house stood the blue hills and Cuba green and unknown, the way the first Spaniards must have seen it before they brought their straight rows of cane, tamed the wild green with double stands of palms.
Lisette saw the way Lisidro bent his head toward this house, this little dream. His lips moved, wordless. Alicia took her hand. And then Lisette was sitting at a wood table inside a small kitchen. A kerosene stove, a bucket of oil, a yellowed basin filled with water, a refrigerator covered in silver tape, black at the edges. Lisidro kept moving his lips at Lisette. She blinked. Was that her laughter? Inside it was dark; the contrast with the outdoors made her eyes hurt. She tried to look at Alicia, her polished coconut face.
Then a small door from the back of the kitchen opened and in it stood a man, naked to the waist. He carried a black bucket of dimpled fruit. When he saw the stranger at the table, he put the bucket down. Lisidro moved his lips. The man threw his arms in the air. He picked Lisette out of the chair and hugged her.
He went back to the fruit and put the bucket on the table. He picked out two pieces and laid them on a sheet of newspaper. Lisette stared at the fruit. The man finally took one in his hand and split the skin with his fingernail. The fruit smelled like roses. Lisette hesitated. The others watched her. She bit, the taste gritty and sweet, nothing like the sticky red paste that was the only thing she had known of guava in Miami. She swallowed and looked up at the man. His lips moved. And the air came rushing back.
“Your mother tell you about the guava trees here?” he said, and Lisette hearing for the first time. “Biggest fruit in all of Cuba.”
Matún sat down at the last chair and pulled it up close to Lisette.
“Oye, you okay?”
He turned to his wife.
“Oye, Alicia, tráele un baso de agua.”
“No, no,” Lisette said. “I don’t need water. I’m okay.”
“You’re red. This heat.”
“I’m okay. Thank you.”
Lisette swallowed. Matún shook a guava at her slowly.
“Tu mamá,” he began. Then shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re here. I always used to tell my wife, it’s only a matter of time before Santo’s people show up again. Ay. What a wonderful thing, eh?”
He stood and walked back to a small room. Alicia and Lisidro stayed behind at the table. Lisette closed her eyes to shut out the truth that sat with its arms crossed in front of her. And what of it! she wanted to shout. So she lied for years. So she lied! If only Lisette could get up now and return to the hotel in Havana, the men dancing on the Malecón, back to the Cuba she could talk about later, the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness.
“Are you comfortable?” Alicia asked.
Lisette opened her eyes and nodded. “Sí, gracias.”
Matún returned with a small wooden picture frame. He handed it to Lisette. A little girl in pigtails sitting in that very kitchen, all the furniture the same, a bucket of guava in front of her.
“Tu mamá,” Matún said. He shook his head, smiling.
“Your grandparents loved this house,” Alicia said.
“We’ve tried to keep it up for them,” Matún said. “Of course”—he waved his hands—“old age gets us all!” He laughed.
“Speaking of viejos—“
Lisidro stopped him. “Los viejos murieron en Venezuela.”
“Ah. So sorry about your grandparents.” Matún wiped his hands over his chest. “Now, you see, that makes me very sad to hear. They loved this house.” Matún folded his hands. He was lost for a few seconds in contemplation. Lisidro cleared his throat. Were they waiting for Lisette to speak? She was afraid she might shout if she tried.
Matún sighed. “Of course, we didn’t live here then. We lived out back.” He pointed toward the window, past the empty yard. “It was a small house, ours was, nothing like this. I finally had to tear it down to build the chicken coop. You saw the roosters? Prize-winning. Back when they gave out prizes.” Matún laughed again.
They were silent.
“Yes, your grandparents were very good people. There was never any problem because of”—he paused and rubbed his skin—“you know. Not with them. They’d make coffee here and holler out the back for us to come and sit with them. They had no problems that way.” Alicia looked at him and then at her hands, folded on the table.
Lisette handed Matún the photograph.
“Same with us,” Matún said, taking back the frame. “We’d make coffee, we’d call them over, we’d all sit together. We had no problems either. In some ways, it was better then.” He looked at Lisidro and stopped. “We’re just here taking care of the house. If you ever wanted to return—”
Lisette shook her head. “First time,” she began. “What I mean is, if this is my first time here, how could I return?”
She looked around the table and thought to smile. Finally, Alicia laughed and they all joined in. Alicia took Lisette by the hand.
“Come, I’ll show you the rest.”
Lisette paused. She could see from where she sat that the rest was another small room with a chair and beyond that a room that she guessed to be where Matún and Alicia slept.
“No, gracias.” Lisette pulled her hand out of Alicia’s and patted her shoulder. “Later—I’ll see it for the next time.”
“You can’t come all this way and not see the house!” Matún shouted.
“It’s okay,” Alicia said, looking at Lisette. “She’s tired.”
“Yes, I’m enough tired from the trip.”
“Nonsense!”
Matún took her by the hand.
“One minute only.”
Lisette stood and nodded. She let her hand relax in Matún’s.
The narrow hallway that ran from the kitchen connected a small sitting room to two back rooms, each painted green.
“Your mother slept here,” Matún said with a flourish of his arm.
A lace curtain covered the top half of the window, darkening the room. A wooden dresser was pushed up against the corner, its knobs worn black and shiny. The narrow bed was straight and tidy under the window.
Matún followed her gaze and nodded.
“Everything here was hers.”
The others walked out and Lisette stood for a moment at the door. She walked into the room, half hearing Matún, not seeing the small rug, the low double bed, the flowered curtain strung across one corner.
She turned and walked out, following a crack in the floorboards. Lisidro and Alicia sat in two rocking chairs. A broom leaned against the door.
“My mother—” Lisette began, then stopped. She turned toward the door. When she turned back, she could feel the heat in her cheeks.
“My husband would have been so pleased to see this,” she said. “It’s too bad.” She folded her hands and said more to herself, “My husband, Erminio.”
She let his name hang in the air. Alicia and Lisidro looked at one another, but no one spoke. Lisette breathed in and smiled. She took Matún’s hands and kissed h
im on both cheeks.
“Gracias,” she said. “I must go. I have much work.”
Matún kissed her. Then he put his hands behind his back and turned his head to look out the small window as he spoke.
“You know. The government has been very helpful to us. Yes, very generous with us. They gave us this land when your grandparents left. Every Sunday, me and the wife drive the scooter to Havana and sell guavas and mangoes. We are not poor; we are doing very well,” he said. “Thanks to our government and the grace of God.”
Alicia pulled her shawl closer. The silence of the countryside was like a weight. Lisette looked from Alicia to Matún. He was nodding to himself. “Thanks to the grace of God.”
Lisette reached into her purse as if she were looking for her map. Then she took Matún’s hands. She pressed the bill.
“Un regalito,” she whispered.
His eyes never changed expression until he closed them and bowed ever so slightly. Gratitude and reproach, the small space between knowing and forgetting.
Lisette walked through the hallways, dragging one piece of furniture after another. She didn’t know what she was doing. She needed to do something. And so she moved the armchair into the family room, the bar stools out to the pool. She stood and remembered the lights her father had strung all those years ago, that Christmas when the women loved Erminio. The gazebo was shabby now, a vein of mold running down one column. The lawn had grown over the flowers. It was as if the house had declined in sympathy with her father. In the last days of his illness, the Coral Gables code-enforcement board had sent them a complaint about the tall grass. Lisette had run two red lights in her anger. At city hall, she had ranted about the rights of man until a security guard escorted her out. She had regretted it and written a letter of apology later, a very proper repentance. She was an editor at the paper now, had her own office overlooking the bay. She was a little in love with a German psychologist who loved her back. In the evenings they had long conversations about the will and happiness. On Sundays, they had some people from his practice for lunch and she put out her good crystal and the leather-bound Rilke.