La Americana

by Melanie Bowden Simón

  He peered in at me, and I shrugged in question.

  “The nicotine sucks up the water,” he said, smiling.

  Chapter 32

  Pi-Chi!

  The figure of a small boy stood at the top of the stairs.

  “Pi-Chi!” Luis called, his arms open as he skipped every other step until he reached his little one standing in the shadows. He scooped him up, cub-like, and kissed him all over his face.

  I stayed at the base of the stairs until Luis looked down and motioned with his head to come up. They disappeared through the doorway, and nerves ping-ponged in my stomach.

  Timidly, I walked through the doorway, greeted by many smiling faces, and landed several besitos (the small, customary kisses on the cheek) from each family member.

  A petite face was buried into Luis’s neck and arms wrapped tightly around.

  “Papi,” said Luis to his little one, who didn’t move from his nesting spot.

  Luis rubbed his back and again: “Papi, this is Melanie.”

  His head lifted just slightly, and his large brown eyes briefly moved my way, but he never looked at me directly.

  I smiled. “Hola,” I said.

  Nothing back. Conversations among all of the family members resumed. I was in the dark because I couldn’t follow any one in particular. I sat quietly, engaged as much as possible without contributing. It was too overwhelming.

  Luisito eventually let go of his dad and began playing around the room, but still he wouldn’t look my way, much less get near me. He needed time, so I gave it to him.

  The following day, we piled into the car, with Luisito seated next to me in the backseat while his dad drove. He sat quietly looking out the window. I wasn’t going to interact until he was ready, so again I waited.

  A bit down the road, on our way to a nearby lake, young Luis sat up on his knees (car seats are unheard of in Cuba) and leaned into me. He pulled my sunglasses off my head and laughed. Touchdown. He was communicating.

  I took miniature frames off him and wriggled the tight fit onto the bridge of my nose. He giggled and slipped my pink ones onto his face. They slid down his nose so he tried again. “Whoop! There they go again!” we roared.

  Luis watched from the rear-view mirror and joined in the laughter. At ease, Luisito squirmed into the side of me until we reached the lake, giggling most of the way.

  Luis and Luisito, Matanzas, Cuba (courtesy of Melanie Simón).

  There we rented a small boat and took to the water, arriving at the foot of a tall piling of rocks. Luis picked up his son and climbed the flattest of the stones until he reached a small pool above. I followed, settling on what seemed the steadiest rock, and dipped my toe in water, jerking immediately from the freezing temperature.

  I opened my arms to Luisito, who situated himself into my lap before watching his father make a one-eighty and dive into the water.

  “You’re crazy!” I yelled. “It’s freezing!”

  Luis’s head shot up.

  “Que frío!” and laughed, swimming as quickly as he could to the other side. There, he and Coco climbed another set of rocks and on count, jumped, both letting out exaggerated hollers on impact.

  Howling and giggling with them, the responsibility in the thirty-five pounds of innocence that sat on my legs was large. I knew Luis trusted me with his son.

  Chapter 33

  The Real Deal

  Being together was easy, but living together in the same country was an entirely separate issue. I couldn’t find a way in my mind to be in Cuba for any extended period of time that made sense. At the same time, Luis needed to find his way out legally so that he could come back and visit his family, with whom he is so close.

  I thought (without knowing any facts about how to do so): I could marry Luis, but that would mean more separation from him as we filed paperwork, a lot of travel on my part (which equaled money that I didn’t have), and copious amounts of explaining to everyone at home. The latter made me most nervous.

  I didn’t want to feel sorry for myself, but I did wonder on occasion why it was so easy for other couples so much of the time. They meet, they fall in love, they marry, they have babies. We met, we fell in love, but the being together in any one place to be married and living as a pair was daunting.

  So many of our conversations began with the same hypotheticals: What if Luis could get a visa to a European country and I could meet him there? I could find a job. It could work and my family wouldn’t be so worried. But then there was no assurance that he could get a visa, as he had been denied. Maybe I could get permission to study at the university in Cuba and we could be together? But then what? Would we just stay in Cuba? That wasn’t going to work.

  Sitting in Luis’s room, we were plagued by these very questions.

  “What if …” I started and stopped abruptly.

  Luis looked at me quizzically as I gnawed my thumbnail.

  “What if we got married ? Like the real thing?”

  “Yes. Yes. I love you, Mel.”

  Yes, yes, yes! Suddenly, we were engaged. There was no ring or planning or logical thought behind it.

  It was mindboggling, but somehow it made sense. We were ecstatic. I all but jumped and screamed in a fit of joy. Like children we ran downstairs and announced to Ana that we were going to get married. Her excitement must have been met with hesitation, as surely this meant her son and closest friend would move away, but she hid it beautifully and celebrated our happiness.

  In a matter of days we decided on December 4 of that year. We would marry in Cuba to begin the formal paperwork and then we could have another service in the States once he joined me at home. A Cuban lawyer and friend of Luis’s told us it typically took six to nine months to get a visa.

  Luis’s grandmother and aunts began calling from all over Cuba to congratulate us. It was totally and completely surreal to me. Crazy, crazy! But Luis and I were so happy.

  On the plane ride back to Paris and then Budapest, I was upset after leaving Luis, but so excited about our future that I rode calmly. I was dying to finish out my teaching term, get home, and put on my mother’s ring. I told Luis that I wanted to wear her diamond, the classic, gold Tiffany cut that Jim gave to her and she left to me.

  I thought about my family, my friends. What would they say? I was going to be a wife! I was going to be a stepmother!

  Growing up in the conservatively minded city of Savannah, I had always assumed that I would marry an American with no baggage, meaning no divorces and no children. It was strange to have entered the world in which I found myself wading, but intuition pushed me forward. I didn’t care what people thought. Luis and I were in love, and nothing was stronger than that.

  Chapter 34

  The Elephant in the Room

  The day after I returned to Budapest, I was hit hard with something I had picked up in Cuba. I felt like death for about thirty-six hours, but my new roommate, Omer, an Israeli medical student, home-cooked chicken soup for me. I had moved from my palace to a modest but decent rented room in the Pest district. Omer and I became fast friends, and consequently he was always feeding me outrageously good food—homemade falafel, yogurt sauces, and pasta and eggplant dishes with olive oil that his mother sent from Israel. As my mother would have said, all was divine.

  Once I was able to pick my head up, I found a nearby Internet café in my new neighborhood. No one in my family yet knew about my engagement and I needed to tell my dad first. He was in the process of moving from one house to another in his new hometown of Vidalia and didn’t have a phone hooked up yet. Certainly, I couldn’t call him at work. That’s not the kind of thing you tell your dad when he’s in the midst of running a bank.

  But really, really, I was chickenshit. I didn’t know how to make that call. So I put it into an email. I wrote in the header, “I’m Engaged!”

  Looking back, I probably should have buffered that a bit more. His only daughter, twenty-six years old, living in Budapest, Hungary, writes to say t
hat she is marrying a man she’s seen four times, who lives on Castro’s communist island and doesn’t speak English.

  I didn’t hear from him for three days. I was dying, checking email every few hours of every day. I didn’t know what to think. Finally, his message arrived. While he was shocked by the news and apprehension seeped from the pixels of my foreign computer screen, he gave me his blessing and said he hoped that he could meet “this young man very soon.” There were questions about how long the process would take, where we would live, and what we would do. I could only answer vaguely, as I didn’t know myself. But I would come home soon. I needed roots to start this new journey.

  Even if he was unhappy with my choice, my dad still chose support, as did the rest of my family and friends.

  I began to call them all. As if they had conferred on the topic, their responses were laced with the same striking sincerity: shock and apprehension but ultimately, congratulations.

  After all that I had been through, they all genuinely held my happiness in great regard, but still, in each conversation they tepidly treaded the same waters: Have you really thought about this? Are you sure this is what you want?

  What they wouldn’t ask, but I knew that each considered: Was I attempting to fill a void with the newness of this relationship? How could this be so soon? I had met Luis only four months after my mom died. And like the skirting around with my father, the big elephant that no one dared to touch: how did I know that he wasn’t just marrying me to get out of the country?

  Had I been in their shoes I would have asked those very questions. Yet, there was no mixing of the two for me. My mother and Luis were distinct people with two separate places in my heart. I never felt that Luis was filling the loss of my mother. No one could do that. As for him marrying me to get out of Cuba, it simply wasn’t true. I knew this, but there was no way to explain it. They would still doubt until they met him and maybe even then. But I was comfortable in my decision and that would have to be enough.

  I knew that it seemed irrational and maybe even irresponsible for me to marry someone from Cuba, and someone so different from me in many ways. Yet, in perspective, nothing was stranger than my mother dying at fifty-three. Sure, my decision to marry Luis didn’t make sense on paper, I agreed, but at that point in my life, what did? My mom was gone and I had never imagined I would lose her before I got married and had children.

  Chapter 35

  Grim Reaper

  My dream was agitated. It was a running stream of the same event and coordinates over and over again. My aunt Cathi, my mom’s sister, was in a room with me. She was young, maybe a teenager. But then she wasn’t really Aunt Cathi. She was my mom, if not in face, then in spirit. In dreams dual citizenship of the same body is allowed, I suppose. The sisters in their unison felt rebellious (much like my aunt was as a young person), with short, bobbed red hair. We were in a cramped upstairs bedroom of someone’s house. I felt locked away.

  My aunt/mother looked at me and said, “You’re going to die soon.”

  I retorted, “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you’ve got more stomach than people understand.”

  I knew what she meant in the dream but not when I woke up.

  “And Walter?”

  She brushed the comment off. “Long time.”

  I said that I wanted to live at least long enough to see my grandchildren. Then a Jack Russell appeared just outside the small bedroom window, scratching and clawing until it squeezed through. Now, Mom, Aunt Cathi, and I were three separate individuals in the room.

  Mom said, “Get that dog away from me.”

  And the sweet little dog suddenly looked vicious, like a canine Grim Reaper, and attempted to fly over me to get at Mom, who, by then, was standing behind me. I reared up and hit it in the nose with a short, thick drinking glass (that appeared out of nowhere). The ferocious dog retracted, slipped away, and suddenly wasn’t so frightening.

  I woke up. Damn death dog. Wish I could have slammed it with an entire glass building.

  Chapter 36

  Castro, Bush, and the Racy Tango

  I rode out my last few weeks in Budapest lonely, save several days that my friend, Zia, came to visit. He teased me as I curled into my pillow at night with Luis’s scented shirt. I missed him desperately and I began to miss home. Home was closer to Luis, although not much given my restrictions as an American.

  I received an email from Luis that first week of July. He was worried that Fidel was going to shut down the US consulate. The word around Cuba was that Bush was going to send two large ships to the coast of Cuba and anyone who wanted to come to the US could. This was following an announcement by Castro that, according to a recent poll, more than 70 percent of the Cuban population supported his version of socialism. So Bush, in his best mine’s-bigger-than-yours bluff, called him out on it.

  Those two were dancing a racy tango, one behind the other, and Luis and I were very concerned. The Bush-Castro rift was gaining strength and it seemed enough to damage all relations between the two countries. If they cut off all ties, where would that leave us?

  It was stressful, but we couldn’t focus on it. All we could do was go ahead as planned. I couldn’t do anything anyway until I got home.

  In Savannah, my father had quietly put his own wheels in motion. He made a call to a lawyer, who made a call to a friend, who made a call to another friend who knew someone in Miami. The latter was a Cuban woman, a consultant for people just like me, looking for help to get someone out of Cuba.

  Her fee was acceptable. She told me that if we married in Cuba and then filed papers, it could take a year or more to get Luis out of there. If we applied for a K-1, or fiancé visa, for Luis through the US government, then it should only take about three months. This was music to my ears.

  Once in the US, he and I would have to marry within three months of his arrival. I’d marry him at airport baggage claim, I thought, if I could get him to Savannah. To apply I needed documentation for him—birth certificate, photos, the works, as well as three years of my income taxes, a note from the bank as to how much money I had, and bios about each of us. In addition, I had to send copies of two plane tickets to Cuba and two photos of us together.

  Here’s where it became a little tricky. The trips I had already taken to Cuba were without a US-backed license to do so. The consultant didn’t think that this would be a point of contention, as she didn’t believe the US government was going to give me a hard time about my reasons for being there. I only needed to prove that Luis and I had actually met and shared some time together. In other words, I wasn’t a hired bride.

  But because this was a new life for us, we didn’t want any chance for mishaps. We needed to find the patience to do things correctly. Therefore, I would have to make two more trips with formal permission. This would take more money and more time. The idea of a December wedding was out the door.

  At the top of my list were finding a job and the means to get to Cuba with a visa. The first was easy. I returned to my old restaurant job. This was not what I wanted to do, but I would have some flexibility with travel as I could usually find someone to pick up shifts.

  As for the visa, I found an organization in the Midwest that fostered direct assistance to Cubans living with AIDS in Havana. The purchase of an individual license under the auspices of their general license would allow me to be in Cuba for up to two weeks. The only requirement was that I deliver a box of medical supplies or donate cash to a church in Central Havana.

  I booked my ticket to Cuba for September, thrilled not only to see Luis (it would be two and a half months apart by the time I got there), but also happy to be out of the US on the first anniversary of 9/11, which was overwhelming to me.

  In the weeks before my trip I collected various samples from doctors and dentists I knew around town. Generously, they all loaded bags of toothpaste and brushes, floss and rinse, as well as bandages, aspirin, antacids, and the like. All equally fascinated, they as
ked much about Cuba, its conditions, and the people. They wanted to know what would happen once Castro was gone one day. All I could offer were personal observations, nothing more. I was still a novice at Cuban culture and life.

  Come September, on the flight to Miami, I flipped through the in-flight magazine in record time and pursed my lips while knocking my knees back and forth. I had to spend the night in Miami and then return to the airport the next morning. The charter company requested that I arrive three hours before the flight. Thank God I got there even earlier.

  Finding the terminal was a challenge, as no one in the airport knew where it was. It was like some guarded secret and finally, one official was finally able to direct me.

  Among the others waiting, a handful of Cubans were old-school elegant, quietly sitting in their tailored shirts, fitted pants, and Italian shoes. Their watches were expensive, but tasteful. Pacing the floor were the “Miamified” young guys, decorated with gold, and lots of it. It was an all-out show of necklaces, watches, earrings, and bracelets and the more audacious, the better.

  Other seats and stances were taken by the guajiros (country folks) of Cuba, who, in their own way, tried to one-up each other with their gargantuan cowboy hats and belt buckle bling. Finally, I, the gringita, in all her paleness, stood with the others in the first of four lines. One line was to check visas, licenses, and passports, one was to search and weigh luggage, the third was to pay taxes on the overweight baggage, and finally the last was check-in. It was absolute inefficiency at its best.

  This was identical to what I had experienced in Budapest when I was asked to pay for two separate items at two separate registers that shared the same countertop. Communism is exhausting.

  Though the pre-boarding process was long, the flight was not. Thirty-five minutes on a small Gulfstream and I was reminded of how close we were, though seemingly moons apart.

  I crossed passport control easily, with only a few noted remarks about my visa and visit to the church. My box of supplies was met with relative ease and it appeared no one had the patience to pull each individual item for inspection. I had been cleared to leave when a female guard on my left at the exit put her hand out. I stopped. She flagged the other guard to my right and nodded to my purse, a New York Times overflowing from the top.