Havana Noir

by Achy Obejas

  From the beginning, Mahler had stayed with Dionisio’s family rather than at a hotel. He’d come four or five times a year, visits that could last a few days or as long as a month. His presence became so constant that Dionisio’s family had formally surrendered a room to him off the courtyard. During my visit, I was in Rocky and Dionisio’s room, which put Dionisio with his policeman cousin Raúl in another room.

  “He is a wonderful person,” Dionisio’s mother told me about Mahler, “and a very good cook.”

  During each visit, Mahler would fill the fridge and cabinets with foods normally out of the family’s reach: beef and seafood, dry cereals, fresh milk and cheese, canned veggies, and condiments such as mayonnaise and mustard. Each morning before taking off for work, he’d take over the kitchen and produce the kind of hearty breakfast the Cubans went wild over: steak and eggs or pancakes, skillets brimming with sausage and bacon or, once, biscuits and gravy.

  His revolutionary fervor was well-known, yet after unsuccessfully trying to enlist the family in marches and volunteer projects, he had mostly gone about his business, talking things up but not pushing. It was no secret, though, that Mahler had been deeply disappointed when Dionisio took up with Rocky. But because Rocky had chosen to stay in Cuba, his feelings of “betrayal”—if I’m to guess from his words to me at the airport—had been somewhat assuaged.

  Mahler didn’t see their relationship as a triumph of love over politics. Instead, he considered Rocky the cause of potential revolutionary slippage. Rocky, according to Tom Mahler, was a temptation—not necessarily erotic (it was actually appalling how he seemed to see my sister as a cut-out figure instead of a real girl) but economic and political. He would joke about how Rocky had almost brainwashed Dionisio into leaving Cuba but not quite.

  “Was he falling into temptation, is that it? Are you the reinforcements?” he harangued me one day while we were cleaning rice in the kitchen, his face all smiles but the meanness in his tone evident. “He’s not gonna follow you guys back to your capitalistic island paradise when he has a revolutionary one right here, okay?”

  “Tom, por favor, ya,” Dionisio said, irritated. That was probably the first time I’d heard Dionisio actually confront Mahler; usually he was like everybody else, smiling and shuffiing.

  But no sooner had Dionisio left the room than Mahler started in again. “Are you here to try to get me to fall in line too?” he said, again screwing up his face so that his eyebrows danced in a clownish manner. “You know, there’s nothing you can show me. I’ve not only lived in the belly of the beast, I was born there…I know it better than anyone here, including you two Hawaiians.”

  “We’re not Hawaiians,” I corrected him, exasperated.

  “Right—sorry!” He smiled, his face now feigning concern. “I have to get that. Of course you’re not Hawaiian. I guess I want to equate it with, like, New Yorkers or Hoosiers. I don’t know why I keep tripping on that, although it is a mouthful: not Hawaiian, but from Hawai’i. What do you call that? Not Hawaiian, not mainlander? Haole? But you’re no haole, though you certainly look like one!”

  * * *

  At Dionisio’s family home, the doorbell—a merciless and earsplitting metallic buzzing—rang constantly. There was the man selling illegal crabs (“How many can I buy?” I heard his mother cautiously ask); the man selling a fluorescent tube, maybe several feet in length, frosty and miraculously intact (“No, thank you,” said Dionisio himself, then quickly added, “but Mrs. Wu down the street, Estrellita’s mother—yes, the widow with the balcony full of flowers—I bet she could use this”); the woman selling illegal bags of cement who appeared with backbreaking knapsacks as local kids with features I too had begun to see as increasingly Asian paraded through the family courtyard, stacking the cement under an awning and covering it up with sheets of paint-splattered plastic. The cement was meant for an illegal addition the family was planning on the roof—in fact, a kind of studio apartment for Dionisio and Rocky.

  I was told—by both Rocky and Dionisio and later, again, by his mother and Raúl, the policeman cousin who’d come in from Banes, the family’s provincial home, to live with them in the capital—that I was not to let Tom Mahler know about these purchases, that in fact Tom was not to know about the cement at all.

  “He wouldn’t approve,” Rocky said.

  “But won’t he like seeing that there’s more permanence to your stay?” I asked.

  Rocky shook her head.

  Still, I thought it peculiar at best to try withholding the information since the plastic sheets were obviously changing shape, growing both taller and fatter by the day as more cement bags were delivered, but Rocky assured me this was the agreed on strategy.

  “Don’t you think he’ll be able to tell?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “In Cuba—it’s strange—people are remarkably good at not seeing anything they don’t want to see.”

  “But he’s not Cuban,” I pointed out.

  “He thinks he is,” she said by way of explanation. “He’s zenzizenzic, actually.”

  I laughed. “But he’s American!”

  “Gringo Z!” Rocky exclaimed. “Mami would be so proud that we’ve discovered a new species!”

  Indeed, I already had so much to tell her and my dad.

  The first couple of weeks in Cuba, I really struggled to make myself understood (and heard above the barking and horn blowing and general human effusiveness that leaked into every corner of the house). Cubans swallowed letters, syllables, whole words sometimes. And they spoke at rocket speed, punctuating everything with a physicality that was equally quirky and anxious. They slapped their hands, punched their fists in their palms, snapped their fingers in the air (all at once!), thumped their chests, rubbed their tummies, and danced their digits on any and all surfaces. Plus, the heat didn’t seem to bother them at all, while I felt like there was a giant iron on my head all the time.

  “But Malía, isn’t Hawai’i tropical too?” Dionisio’s mother asked me as she cut up a large avocado in the family kitchen. She lifted the knife into the air, whirling it around to suggest something akin to a vortex but which I understood to be shorthand for climate.

  “Yes,” I explained, “but there are trade winds, and the islands are smaller, and we have mountains.”

  “We have mountains too,” said Raúl, leaning against the counter while waiting for water to boil so he could bathe. He raised his right arm, his palm capping off what would be a mountain top, then brought it down and scratched his chest. The pot next to him—caked white on the inside and used exclusively to heat bathwater—hummed on the flame.

  “Yes, but…” How to explain the difference between Cuban mountains—thick, green, and sloping—and Hawaiian mountains that go straight up, like sheets of rock, and dominate every landscape? How to explain that a tropical island can have snowcapped peaks?

  “And you have volcanoes, right? Rocky is always showing us pictures and videos of the volcanoes,” said Dionisio’s mother. This time, the knife indicated an incline. “She loves the volcanoes; I guess that’s very Hawaiian.”

  I nodded, amused. “Yes…” Rocky had warned me not to bother to correct the Cubans: They would insist we were Hawaiian, no matter what we said. And, in fact, it was almost dizzying. Everywhere we went, to whomever I was introduced, we were Las Hawayanas, over and over.

  “So it’s actually hotter then, hotter than here, because a volcano would be spitting out fire, right?” the policeman cousin asked, smiling courteously as he puckered then extended his fingers outward. He turned off the fire and lifted the pot to take to the bathroom. He stood there, perspiring, waiting for my response as the steam rose. His face was so kind, it was nearly impossible to imagine him as a cop.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t work that way,” I tried again with my limited Spanish.

  They nodded at me politely.

  “We are on the same latitude, no?” Dionisio’s mother asked. The knife crisscrossed the air horizontally now. />
  “Yes, but it’s different,” I said, realizing even as I insisted that I would never convince them.

  “Of course it’s different!” exclaimed a buoyant Tom Mahler, bounding into the kitchen for a glass of water for Mrs. Wu, whom he was entertaining in the living room. He’d obviously heard the tail end of our chat. “Hawai’i is an American colony, ripped of all its freedom and tradition. Cuba is a free and sovereign nation!”

  “Look, Tom, you don’t know—” I started to say, but then Raúl excused himself and trotted off to bathe, bumping right smack into me.

  “I am so sorry!” he said, the hot water having splashed him, not me. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded as Raúl and Dionisio’s mother shrugged, both slightly chagrined.

  In the meantime, Tom laughed, practically skipping back to Mrs. Wu with a cold glass of water.

  I confess I was amazed in Cuba—not at Socialism’s wonders, even as Tom rattled off literacy rates (“The highest in the Western Hemisphere—even higher than the United States!” he exuded) and infant mortality rates (“The lowest in the Western Hemisphere—even lower than the United States!”). More precisely, I was astounded by how my sense of being an islander was constantly challenged. Nearly every Cuban I met happily confessed he or she couldn’t swim. This, of course, was nearly unheard of in Hawai’i, where learning to swim is no more of an option than learning to breathe. The Cubans sat on their weathered Malecón with their backs to the sea, unaware and undisturbed, chatting and drinking and sometimes even fishing, their lines dangling behind them as they continued their social dalliances. Just looking at them facing away from the water like that gave me the willies.

  They wore shoes—flats and loafers but often heavy-soled shoes, more suitable for mountain climbing than anything else, and even better if the shoes were some brand they recognized: Mephisto, Doc Martens, and Prada of course. And they kept those shoes on all the time, even in their own homes, constantly wary of germs and viruses that, according to them, were both ubiquitous and lethal if they attached themselves to a naked foot.

  “You don’t die from the virus,” Raúl explained, trying to reassure me, “but from the symptoms.”

  These were said to be utterly extravagant. There was the patatú, an attack of undetermined origin completely undetectable by medical science, the sirimba (a milder form), and a whole series of weird medical conditions with no translations that even Rocky openly laughed about. What was crazy was that Dionisio—a medical doctor!—actually seemed to sign on to these diagnoses.

  “You’re telling me that you really believe empachos can only be caused by eating too much Cuban food?” I asked.

  Dionisio nodded serenely. He was less handsome than charming, with a gentility in his eyes that made my sister’s attraction to him completely understandable.

  “But isn’t that just indigestion?” I asked, irritated. “Couldn’t you just get it from overeating anything?”

  He shook his head. “No, no—this is particular. Malía, it doesn’t happen to people who don’t have a regular diet of Cuban food.”

  Was he kidding me? I couldn’t tell. I was going to ask him about embolias, which I suspected, having killed his father, might take us down a more serious path, but then he started talking about serenos, a condition said to occur when you step outside and are enveloped in the night air.

  “The night air? For real?” I asked, looking for cracks in his façade.

  Dionisio shrugged. “And only old people can tell if you really have it.”

  “That’s so mental! C’mon!”

  Rocky laughed and laughed. “She’s not very Cuban, see?”

  “Of course she is,” he said sympathetically, then reached out to touch the back of my head. His fingers dug through my hair to my scalp. “Absolutely she is.”

  “What are you doing?” I snapped, pulling away from him. Rocky was holding her sides now, she was laughing so hard.

  “Well, it’s as I suspected, somebody probably touched your mollera when you were born,” he said after his cursory examination of the spot at the very top of my skull.

  “My what?”

  “Your mollera.”

  I looked at Rocky for clarification but she was bright red, tears streaming down her face. “Your…” She pointed at the back of her head between gulps and hysterics.

  “It’s a soft cranial spot, very sensitive, much more sensitive on Cuban babies than on any other babies,” Dionisio said, still straight-faced. “You know, if it gets touched when you’re little—if it gets touched the wrong way—you can suffer irreparable harm, like losing your Cubanness. But yours—”

  “Por dios!” I said in Spanish, naturally Cubed for once. “You’re just playing with me!”

  And they both fell back on the couch, Rocky bubbling like lava and Dionisio finally erupting, slapping his thighs and his chest in the national fashion.

  It wasn’t until later, alone in my noisy room writing in the travel journal I’d decided to keep for my parents, that I realized I’d never gotten a chance to ask about embolias.

  As a result of the Cubans’ collective hypochondria, we had to watch for germs and viruses that could cause these things, and wear shoes—real shoes—all the time. To me, it was a real hardship not to go barefoot in the house. But my slippahs, which were the only things that really made sense to me day to day in the tropics, were a source of such embarrassment that one night, Dionisio’s mother asked Rocky to please suggest I not wear them as we headed out to a nearby casual restaurant.

  “Just wear sandals,” my sister said, amused.

  But it was all I could do to keep from laughing when Tom Mahler showed up that night with his feet encased in the dirtiest, most disgusting rope sandals I’d ever seen. Halfway to the restaurant, the left one came apart and he just chucked it to the side of the street (trash cans were virtually nonexistent, even in touristy areas like Chinatown, so that Rocky and I, our American habits ingrained, tended to walk around with handfuls of trash at any given moment) and kept going with only one sole protected.

  “Oh, Tom, you can’t do that, it’s littering!” Rocky said, picking up the sandal remains between her thumb and index finger.

  The entire family looked on in horror at each step Mahler took, warning him about upcoming dog feces, unidentified animal remains, vomit, and other revolting obstacles.

  “You’re such gringas!” he exclaimed, motioning to the rest of the family for support with a flail of his arms. In response, they just nodded again.

  “Tom—” I started to say, but Rocky elbowed me so hard, I almost lost my balance.

  “That’s not ordinary trash—it’s hemp, it’s organic, it’ll decompose,” he explained.

  “Not for a long time, Tom, not for a long time,” Rocky said.

  She carried that thing all the way to the restaurant, dumped it in the kitchen trash, and, because she was carrying her own bar of soap in her purse, was able to scrub her hands before settling down to eat. The entire family maneuvered to avoid Tom Mahler, so he sat next to me, his left leg across his right knee, the germ-infested bottom of his foot bumping into me and leaving viral traces on my skirt throughout the meal.

  “Careful or you’ll have an empacho,” Dionisio said, his chin pointing at the huge chicken and rice dinner before me.

  In all honesty, I could hardly eat. Rocky’s jab had had its effect. “I thought you needed a regular diet of Cuban food to be vulnerable to those,” I shot back, trying to be jovial.

  “Well, you’re on your way,” Mahler said, grinning malevolently, “don’t you think? Soon you’ll be like your sister, Cuban again, wanting to stay. Then you’ll have a fully rounded Cuban diet all the time.”

  Infuriatingly, the family—Dionisio and Rocky included—again just smiled, their lips zipped.

  It was just a few days before my scheduled departure (a long, roundabout trip from Havana to Kingston to Miami to Houston to San Francisco to, finally, Honolulu) when Dionisio and Rocky annou
nced a party.

  “But not just any party—a luau!” said Rocky.

  “A luau?” I asked. Was she kidding?

  “Turns out,” she said, all excited, “that Eddie Kamae is in Havana for a world music festival. Dionisio found out and invited him to dinner.”

  “So maybe he’d like a typical Cuban flesta or something instead of another luau, don’t you think?”

  Rocky waved me off. “Don’t you see? It’s such a great opportunity to show the family a little bit of Hawaiian culture. Eddie’s probably getting plenty of Cuban everything from his festival hosts.”

  When we told Tom Mahler, he immediately filed his protest: He thought it inappropriate that Rocky and I—nonHawaiians—should be leading anyone through a Hawaiian experience. “You yourselves have gone out of your way to tell me you’re not Hawaiian, and now you’re pretending to be our cultural tour guides?”

  “Don’t worry, Tom,” Rocky said with a wink, “it won’t be authentic, but diluted and commercialized—as much as we can do that here.”

  To my surprise, the family laughed openly and Mahler, stuck somewhere between pride and embarrassment, shrunk a little.

  To prepare, we put together the Hawaiian supplies I’d brought and went out searching for a few other necessary items, like flowers and pork. Raúl was negotiating for a lively little piglet raised on a neighbor’s balcony when, unable to keep silent anymore—it’d been almost a month of putting up with Tom Mahler and following everybody else’s passive example—I confronted Dionisio and Rocky.