La Americana

by Melanie Bowden Simón

  We stepped up onto a wraparound porch, topped by a trellis covered in a wild spray of colors. The windows were open, but the front door wasn’t. I propped my hands in the sill of one and leaned in while Cynthia fixed herself similarly in the one next to me. Like his writing, Hemingway’s house was uncluttered and masculine, exuding a rough sophistication. Kills from his hunts hung on the walls, overlooking rows and rows of books stacked and lined throughout the house.

  I was mesmerized by the books. My glasses out and on, I stretched my eyes as far as they would reach, but they weren’t strong enough to read book titles on the faded jackets.

  Luis suddenly appeared next to me and Cynthia quietly moved on. He pointed to items in the house, offering details about the rows of military jackets, boots, and hats in the closet. I only captured pieces, though I nodded in assurance. An English-speaking guide stationed on the porch chimed in, noting that everything in the house remained the same as Hemingway left it in 1960. Other notables: he and his fourth wife, Mary, lived on the property with fifty cats—give or take a few—and he always stood while writing.

  We visited Pilar, Hemingway’s beloved wooden boat, and saw the gravestones for his four dogs. The graves sat clearly marked next to the pool, once blessed, they say, by a naked Ava Gardner.

  The “lookout” of “Lookout Farm,” a separate building on the compound, gave way to a lush second-floor view. There I studied photos of Hemingway with his muse for The Old Man and the Sea, as well as those of him with Castro and in the bars where he sat frequently enough to inspire lyrics from the great Compay Segundo, one of the Buena Vista Social Club superstars.

  Afterward we drove back into Vedado to Cristobal Colón Cementery, the fourth largest cemetery in the world, with approximately 800,000 graves across 140 acres. We parked and walked under the two wide arches of the entrance, built by the Spanish in the late 1800s. I’m not sure if it is fact or folklore, but it is said that the large pass is a tomb for a construction worker who died while building it.

  The cemetery is an intricate requiem and has the makings of a small European city, paved with roads for walking and viewing the thousands of elaborate mausoleums, gravestones, and family vaults. Cubans and tourists frequently visit one statue in particular—La Virgen de La Milagrosa, or Miracle Woman—who holds a baby in one arm and a cross in the other. She is said to have died giving birth and she and her baby were buried side by side. Yet, when their bodies were exhumed as is done every two to three years to make room for other family members, the baby was found in her arms.

  Women go there to pray for their children, or ones they one day hope to have. The Virgen is held in such regard in Cuban culture that it is out of the question to turn a back to her. Visitors face her as they walk away, only coming about when they are entirely out of her line of vision.

  In those surroundings I could recognize the haunting beauty, but I couldn’t appreciate the landscape of tributes for what it was. A heaviness came over me that I couldn’t attribute to the pressure of the day’s heat.

  Cutting a path away from Cynthia and Luis, I wandered alone, feeling like I did in New York City. I had walked block after block after block, barely pausing for traffic, until the tingling that raced up and down my legs turned to complete numbness in the freezing temperatures outside. The cold air on my face reminded me I was alive at all when little else did. Skirting the headstones of others, I retreated deeply inside myself. Tears fell in large, hard drops, leaving a trail on the ground that had long been irrigated by the flood of others. My connection wasn’t personal, though it felt that way.

  The complete loss of control, the disarray of emotions, felt like an affront to any progress I had made in Cuba. With seemingly no strength in me, I pulled it from the clear, blue sky to find my way back to the taxi where Luis and Cyn were already sitting. Certainly they recognized my chaotic mess, but neither said anything. They greeted me sweetly and we drove off without saying a word.

  This was the day Cyn had arranged for us to move out of our hotel to rent a habitación from a local couple. A friend of a friend of hers had recommended the ground-level apartment. In a different barrio, the vibe of the neighborhood was much more urban. Inside was clean and quaint enough and we were led to a simple room with peach walls and a tall yellow ceiling that helped keep the room cool. Two beds were pushed together and a standing fan scanned the room.

  Our hosts were a young married couple, both of whom spoke spot-on English. Karina was a Cuban medical student, as beautiful and elegant as she was bright, and Victor was from Sweden. He tinkered with computers, though I’m not sure what was accomplished, and he made an excellent host.

  Luis left us to settle in, but planned to return that night. Victor, a natural comedian, made an outstanding dinner, paired with red wine that swiftly kicked me out of my funk.

  By the time Luis arrived, I was in a good mood. He took us to Café Cantante, a small bar with a stage on the bottom floor of Teatro Nacional, Havana’s national theater. A young band rocked the stage, mixing up traditional salsa with rap.

  Luis told us a couple of times that he didn’t dance, which would make him just about the only one in the whole country who doesn’t, but he in fact could. He was shy, but could move once propelled onto the dance floor. After much coercion Cyn and I were successful at just that. However, not two minutes later, she once again played her little disappearing act.

  Luis and I bonded as dance partners, and as the crowd swelled late into the night, the physical distance between us lessened in increments. The music was very loud, but I never felt the need to talk. The gift of my disheveled state at that time was inherent freedom. I was an emblem of nature at its core, a child who reacted simply and directly to whatever was in front of her. If I didn’t want to talk, I didn’t. I wasn’t concerned if Luis liked me or if he didn’t. I didn’t care what I looked like or what I said. All was precisely in the moment.

  With his face in the cusp of my neck and my hands locked in his, we moved from distant foreigners to friends, and perhaps something beyond, in a full sweep.

  We were like that for some time until the band stopped, abruptly, and bright lights swept the room. In a snap, we found ourselves close, nose to nose, and Luis suddenly seemed nervous. I followed suit. We both looked around, anywhere but at each other, and noted something or other about Cynthia. I said that we should probably find her. We broke apart like snapped chopsticks, each taking a step back.

  Cynthia found us, asking to go because some guy was giving her a hard time. “Of course,” I said, grabbing her hand to lead us out.

  Luis drove us back to the apartment and gave Cynthia a peck on the cheek. Sneaky little booger, she bolted immediately, already on the other side of the apartment door by the time my foot touched the street. I aimed to offer my cheek, but Luis kissed me quickly on the lips. I took it like an electric shock, waving good-bye as I scurried inside. I may as well have been fourteen years old.

  I didn’t know if I would see Luis again, because the next day we were going by bus to Trinidad, a coastal town four hours east of Havana. With little emotion, I simply accepted reality as it was.

  Cyn and I crashed hard into bed around four, only to be up three hours later. Our bus ride initially followed the highway through Cuba’s interior, bordered by mountains and coconut and mango trees. From our bus perch, we passed clopping horse-drawn carriages and clusters of people with their thumbs out, hoping to hitch a ride.

  Victor had warned us that we would be bombarded by throngs of people trying to get us to stay with them, but I had never experienced anything like this. People flashed pictures of their homes, spouting out broken English.

  “Good house!” they screamed, these Cuban paparazzi, shining their brightest lights on us, pleading for our business.

  Victor had made a call the previous night to find us a place. We spotted a middle-aged man who held a sign with our names, spelled correctly, and pushed through the crowd to reach him. He was Manuel, a hyperfrien
dly fast-talker. We followed him to his home, deep into cobblestone streets passing freshly painted, bright-colored row houses in the middle of downtown Trinidad. I was overjoyed when I spotted similar birdcage window fronts like those we saw in Havana—blues against peaches and greens against yellows.

  Manuel walked us into the front parlor of his home, through the small kitchen and out the back door. A courtyard stairwell led to our aquamarine apartment with matching fan. It was tiny, but clean and efficient for our needs.

  I looked out of the window and onto a mosaic of terra-cotta rooftops that stretched as far I as I could see, with palm trees sprouted between houses. I miss you, Mom, I thought. I miss you so much I can’t breathe. But I am free, free, free on this little island.

  We stayed in that night and sat at a private table set up for us in the courtyard. While an old-school tape recorder played Cuban music, we dined on two enormous open-faced grilled lobsters, served with potatoes, green beans, and a cucumber salad. Under the stars, we talked and laughed our way through mounds of rice and beans and pieces of divinely sweet fruit.

  This was heaven.

  The next couple of days, Cynthia and I wandered the streets of Trinidad, talking to locals along the way. For one entire day, we basked in the sun on a nearby beach. We walked the white sand and played in the crystal waters, but for the most part we sat, quietly. I tried to read, but couldn’t focus, rereading line after line, so I returned to my healing zone, eyes closed, taking in the sun.

  At some point we made our way to a beach shack, covered in palm fronds, where we bought pizza and margaritas. As we took our spots at the lunch table in full sunlight, a woman sat in my line of view with her back to me. She was forty-five, fifty, maybe, with blond hair cropped just above her neck and a frame that resembled that of my mom’s.

  Behind my sunglasses I squinted in the sun and in the blur she became my mother. I watched her nibble her food and sip her drink. At times she turned her head, pushing my mom’s profile away. But then she would go back to her original pose and I, too, returned to a world with my mom in it. Four months without my mom and I was desperate to see a glimpse of her, even a distorted one.

  Surely my cheeks would have flashed bright red, had my face not already been covered in freckles exacerbated by the sun. I felt pathetic in my own desperation and didn’t tell Cyn of my mind game. I carried on a conversation with her as normal, but my soul continued a simultaneous and emotionally charged game of charades.

  When a waiter came to deliver our pizza, I snapped to. This was ridiculous. How could I be so weak? I was twenty-five years old, an adult, and needed to buck up. Be strong, Mel, I told myself. Yet, any chance I could I found myself returning to the same indulgent delusion. After some time, the woman stood and leisurely walked off.

  I was furious. “Stay!” I wanted to scream.

  Instead, devastated, I helplessly watched her trail toward a hotel in the distance. I didn’t say a word to Cyn and asked her if we could go back to the beach. For the remainder of the day, I lay in the sand and only walked briefly up and down the beach.

  That night, in the middle of town, we found Casa de la Musica, an open-air venue with live music. It was pure freedom under the stars, in a sliver of a town on that strange, little communist island where we danced with the locals for the better part of the night.

  Chapter 12

  Path Finder

  After four days in Trinidad, we decided to head back to Havana. The bus trip should have been four hours, but inched closer to six. Our driver stopped to talk to people on the highway and then to buy pineapples. This would have annoyed me in New York, but in Cuba I found it funny.

  We got back to the station in the late afternoon. As we stepped from the bus, there he was. Luis. I was happy to see him. He got out of his taxi and came over to us and kissed each of us on the cheek. While near the station after dropping a client off, he stopped to look for us. He knew there was one daily arrival from Trinidad, though he had no idea when we were getting back, because we hadn’t either.

  It wasn’t until much later that I found this somewhat unreal. We had crossed each other again, in a city of three million, but it never occurred to me that this might be a path.

  Chapter 13

  Signs and Symbols

  My mother died four months before I traveled to Cuba. She had been sick the seven months prior to that.

  Fitful images of her, jagged and crude, flashed in and out of me with no warning. Particular visuals singed the most: deeply jaundiced skin, yellow as a canary, a swollen belly, a diminishing jawline with pronounced teeth, making her look like a biology class skeleton, and her face wincing in pain as she sat under the lightest setting of the showerhead. As her skin broke down just before dying, my handprint fossilized into her arm and stomach, where I gently touched her, fading only after some time. It was pure science fiction.

  Just two weeks after her death, I had returned to the pandemonium of New York. We were in the throws of organizing a conference that would bring literary giants, scholars, the world’s top political, business, and military leaders, as well as Hollywood’s biggest and brightest, together for outdoor breakfasts and round-table discussions at Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara.

  I had been ordained as the official daily task keeper and detail manager. There were invitation drafts, redrafts, and quadruple redrafts, never-ending lists, directions, and phone numbers to be obtained, mailings, a barrage of phone calls, arranging of cars, flights, and hotel rooms, as well as catering to Hollywood requests, which became more bizarre by the day.

  My patience, already wearing thin in fathoms, played hardball with a sense of professionalism that I tried to maintain in the wake of my mom’s absence. Typically assistants phoned in with specific needs for their bosses. However, one late afternoon a well-known type called directly to ask if he could acquire the money that the magazine was going to use to purchase a first-class airline ticket for him, though he was going to fly out on a friend’s private jet. I paused and thought for one moment he was joking, but then realized he wouldn’t waste his time personally calling upon a magazine assistant if he were. The tone of my voice mustered importance, but it was far from real.

  I told him that I couldn’t make that decision and I would have to filter his request to Tina and the others.

  Another call came from a powerhouse of a star who specifically requested that the room have no caffeine products, no oysters (as if we would strategically place them around the bed as little aphrodisiacs), and no Evian and Perrier bottles. Some other water brand was requested and even more specifically, asked to be placed on the mini bar, on each bedside table, and in the bathroom. The bed’s head also had to be elevated exactly six inches.

  One asked for M&Ms in the room. Not too unreasonable, I thought. However, then I learned that all blue M&Ms had to be removed from the stash. Apparently, my grandmother wasn’t the only one who let superstition rule.

  As the calls increased, so did my anger. It was all so ridiculous. My mother fought so arduously just to live and here was Hollywood losing sleep over candy colors and raw seafood.

  I did my best to focus on work that began early and went late into weekday nights. I tried to keep it together, yet I was more unsuccessful by the minute. The coils inside me were springing. Numerous times through my workday, I shot into the bathroom near my desk and fell apart, sliding down the wall and onto the concrete floor. I sobbed, just short of a wail, until there was nothing left in me. Numbly, I gathered myself, flushed my face with cold water, and put on my reading glasses in an attempt to hide red, swollen eyes.

  Almost nightly, I dreamed about tsunamis so real that I would wake all but leaping from my bed. In them I was always protecting children, usually my young cousins, and once our family dog. The waves never fully covered us, but their force and close proximity were enough to yank me from the deep caves of my heavy sleep hours. Awake, I would lose it and be overcome with an impossible sense of helplessness.

&nb
sp; In defense, I took up yoga. My friend, Allison, had recommended a class taught by Janti, a tall, lithe Brazilian man with wild, curly hair pulled back into a ponytail that sat high on his head.

  I have never been particularly good at yoga because I am seemingly made of concrete instead of human tissue. Even as a young gymnast who competed statewide, I had to work harder than the other girls to do splits. Perhaps that is why Janti’s physical agility astounded me. As one of his pupils—shoeless and covered in spandex, and waiting to be transformed—I wedged into the small studio, which sat two floors above the madness of West Broadway. I think everyone in the class wanted to be just like him. He bent and contorted effortlessly, until he resembled nonhuman shapes like pretzels, butterflies, and Kama Sutra scribbles.

  Janti’s almost two-hour classes were more vigorous than any advanced aerobics class I had managed in college. Despite the level of difficulty I had in achieving poses and keeping up with the Olympic pace, I was inspired to twist and turn my body in ways I didn’t even know were possible.

  The deep yogic breathing was our platform. Somewhere in Internet literature I read that Westerners tend to breathe incorrectly, focusing on the in-breathing, as opposed to the out-breathing.

  As Andre Van Lysebeth explains in Yoga Self-Taught, “All good respiration begins with a slow and complete exhalation, and that this perfect exhalation is an absolute prerequisite of correct and complete inhalation, for the very simple reason that, until a receptacle is emptied, it cannot be filled.”

  For so long I took in my mother’s illness, trying to absorb her pain. The toxic mess was still rattling inside me, like residual oxygen that was no longer beneficial to the body. I needed to be emptied before I could be filled with life again.

  I knew back then that those Saturday morning jaunts in the brutal winter months were not merely about wringing out stress, but also chasing away demons that had me in a headlock. I lost myself in the sessions, taking Janti’s commands like a prophet’s, attempting highly uncomfortable positions. On occasion I surprised myself as I (a) got into the position and (b) held it for the long one, two, three seconds.