Find Me in Havana

by Serena Burdick

  I take hold of your chin and force you to look at me. “Nina, all I want is what is best for you. Your grandmother and I both do.”

  You sink toward me, your chin growing heavier in my hand. “You said we wouldn’t be separated. You promised,” you say, and I think how utterly confusing motherhood is. One moment you are pushing me away, and the next you are as dependent as a small child.

  “You have to go to school, love.”

  “But maybe not boarding school?”

  I drop my hand, exasperated, but loving you. “Drink your punch before the ice melts, and let me get some sleep. We only have a few hours before we land.”

  You turn your head to the window and mutter “I have gum in my mouth,” as if refusing punch is a form of defiance.

  I am too tired to keep arguing with you, and I drop my drink on the stewardess’s tray as she passes and lean back, closing my eyes. I drift into sleep envisioning the blue exterior of my childhood home, Mamá in the window. She is young, looking out at me and my siblings playing a game of follow-the-leader. We each hold a hand on the other’s shoulder as we walk single file around the house, the tallest, Oneila, at the front followed by Manuel and Danita, then Bebo between me and Mercedes. I don’t know if this is an accurate memory or if it ever even happened, but I see each of their faces, the curve of Bebo’s puckered mouth, the mole on Oneila’s cheek, the shade of Manuel’s brown eyes that are the exact color of my own, the enviable height of Danita’s cheekbones and Mercedes’s double, toddler chin lifted in soldierly obedience.

  None of them are like this now.

  When we arrive in Cuba, Mamá will be old, my sisters will be grown and my brothers will be gone, exiled to Miami with their wives. You and your cousins will be the children marching around the yard, but even that will not last long.

  I have no way of knowing that it is in Cuba where our family will crack and divide and never find a way back, that the face I just held in my palm will change forever, a whole new form of pain and betrayal stamped across it. No way of foreseeing the violence that will hobble us at the knees and cripple us into silence.

  Chapter Nineteen

  * * *

  Cuba

  Mother,

  The plane wheels hit the runway and jolt me out of a deep sleep. There’s a violent whir and rumble as we slow, my sleepy body jostling from side to side. The cabin is silent, people gripping armrests and holding their breath until the plane finally stops and everyone springs to life. Compartments are banged open, bags retrieved. You still carry the burlap sack from Mexico that you slide over your arm as you nudge me down the aisle. I feel disoriented and groggy, my eyes struggling to adjust to the light and commotion. In front of me there’s a woman in a pillbox hat and plaid jacket who’s wrestling with her carrying case. Angling the case to get it out from under her seat, she apologizes and takes a step forward, stopped by the back of a wide-shouldered man.

  The woman leans around the man to see. “What is the holdup?”

  “That.” The man points out one of the narrow, oval windows where a dark green jeep is parked under the shadow of the plane’s wing. Armed men spill from the back of it like ants. They move quickly, forming a semicircle around the plane, backs erect, feet wide, long-barreled rifles held across their chests. You latch a hand onto my shoulder, and I think that these men don’t look like the armed men in Mexico. The Mexican police were intimidating but had at least looked official, crisp and clean-cut and appeared slightly bored like the policemen back home. These men out the window look excited, and something about this frightens me. They have scruffy beards and dirty faces and wear wrinkled fatigues with scraggly hair sticking out around berets pushed up high on their foreheads. They look like a pack of scrappy teenagers playing soldier, their expressions tense and alert, the guns shifting in their hands like toys just taken from their boxes.

  “What’s going on?” you ask, and the man who drew our attention outside says with resigned annoyance, “Any number of things, these days.”

  Your face is pale, and your lashes flutter as if a speck of something has landed in your eyes. Slowly, the line moves forward, the woman in the pillbox hat huffing audibly as she leans from side to side to see down the aisle. Cookie-cutter stewardesses in matching blue uniforms stand on either side of the cabin door waving white-gloved hands, looking glamorously cheerful with their perky hats and toothy smiles as they send us off into our postcard vacation, utterly unconcerned about the men with guns at the bottom of the stairs.

  Outside, the sun sets in a purple sky. The air is thick with fumes and brine, sea mist caught in a current of gasoline. When we reach the tarmac, Pillbox-hat Lady is asked for her identification by a squat man with dirt-stained hands, the butt of his rifle brushing the sleeve of her coat. Flustered, she drops her papers as she pulls them from her purse, and the man chortles and picks them up. “Do you have something to be nervous about, Señorita?”

  She shakes her head, her left cheek twitching uncontrollably. The man looks at her papers and waves her through, the woman scurrying away like a mouse let loose. When it is our turn, you step around me and block my view as you dig into your bag. It feels like the border crossing all over again, only this man does not ask any questions. He glances at your California license, jerks his head up and snaps his fingers at another man who steps forward and takes hold of your elbow. This man does not have a gun, but the handle of a large knife secured into a leather sheath at his belt is somehow more terrifying.

  You have told me nothing about what is going on here in Cuba. And as we are ushered forward, then made to climb into the back of an open jeep, I am convinced that Chu Chu has somehow managed to track us down.

  Two men swing into the front seat. Doors slam. The engine kicks to life. A third man—more a boy who hardly looks older than me, with a shadow of new whiskers and an easy smile—jumps into the back, perching on the doorframe with his feet on the seat, a portion of my skirt pinned beneath the worn, leather toe of his boot. He wears a red-and-black armband that says M-26, and he has no gun in his hand. When I glance at his waist, I only see a thin belt holding up his pants. It’s a relief he does not have a visible weapon. The jeep backs out from under the shadow of the plane, the boy holding onto the doorframe with both hands as the low, bright sun slants into my eyes. Now, no one is checking IDs on the tarmac, and the remaining passengers walk freely toward the building, heads down, eyes diverted, as if looking at us will make the soldiers come after them, too.

  We rattle down a narrow road past shacks of tin and cardboard, the homes held together with laundry lines like beads on a string. Buildings rise in the distance. A tall sign reads Casino with letters stacked top to bottom. The streets are cracked as eggshell, pavement splintering out, dirt and sticks collecting along the edges. There are people everywhere, men in bright white collared shirts and women in solid-colored dresses, barefoot children and elderly who sit on overturned buckets with their elbows on their knees. Heads turn as we pass, some nod. One man tips his hat, and our driver waves. In LA, I always imagined the poor were just temporarily down on their luck. No one could actually live on the sidewalk or eat out of a tin can forever. I remember a time when Grant refused a man change and I’d felt badly for him, but Grant told me that in the United States everyone had the opportunity to work. It was just a matter of will. Grandmother Maria told me that was a bunch of rubbish, poor was poor, and rarely did a person have a choice.

  These people don’t have a choice, I think, and yet they don’t seem sad to have houses made of tin with fabric for a door and a bucket for a seat. I like the idea that you can make a home out of nothing. If everything falls apart, I might also be able to make something out of nothing.

  We leave the slums behind, picking up speed on a bumpy road with green fields stretching on either side. Despite your effort to remain cheerful, your eyes are uneasy, and I wonder why we are going with these soldiers so willingly,
not even demanding an explanation.

  To my left, the lush, tropical vegetation is burning. Not huge flames, just a smoldering that crawls along, eating the leafy fronds and spiraling black smoke into the air. It makes me think that whatever is going on here in Cuba is bigger than us.

  The boy perched on the jeep’s doorframe slides down, pinning me between your elbow and his. He might look young, but he’s as tall as any man. He tilts his head out of the wind and cups his hand around a cigarette he’s pulled from a pocket, attempting to light it with a match he strikes against his shoe. He goes through four matches before the tip finally glows red-hot, at which point he leans back exhaling a cloud of smoke that whisks across my face. He extends the cigarette out to you, his arm stretched across me. It looks nothing like the filtered cigarettes you smoke back home, but you pinch the rolled paper between thumb and index finger, the end wet from the boy’s spit, and slide it into your mouth.

  After a good puff, you hand the cigarette back, pulling a strand of hair away from your lips that the wind whips right back.

  The man smiles. “Riel.”

  “Estelita.”

  “Yes. Rodriguez. A picture star.” His Spanish is familiar to me, the rolls and lilts exactly the same as yours.

  Modestly, you say, “Only an actress. Movie stars are another thing entirely.”

  He holds a hand out as if I’m supposed to shake it. “Movie star’s daughter?”

  “Nina.” I stick my hand out, and he pumps it up and down a few times, his fingers thin and delicate for a soldier.

  “Nina, nice to meet you.” He lets go of my hand and leans back in the seat, smoking steadily.

  We drive past rows of huts with palm-leaf roofs, shirtless children and diapered babies playing in mud-filled front yards. Here, women with weary, hardened faces tend contained fires, cooking food over them. The gutters along the road are filled with a stench worse than the smoke, and I pinch my nose closed as we cross a narrow bridge over a thin strip of water, the paved road crumbling under us. We drive into a town with single-story, cement buildings, the windows and doors gaping black holes in their facades.

  “Guanajay.” Your pinched lips relax into a smile. “My home.”

  We drive past the town square where, you tell me, on hot days you and your siblings sat on the steps under the pillared gazebo sucking lemons soaked in sugar cane. “There—” you point at a stucco church with black mold crawling up the side like moss “—is where your grandmother took us every Sunday morning, and that theater,” across the street stands a boarded-up building that looks as though it used to be quite grand, “is the Vincent Mora Theater where I saw El romance del palmar, starring Rita Montaner. Danita and I waited for months for that movie to arrive. We spent hours staring at the poster on the wall of the only hotel in town. Rita was the most beautiful woman we’d ever seen. We practiced her smile in front of the mirror and tried to tie up our hair in perfect bows like she wore hers. Once, we snuck Oneila’s mascara and painted our lashes so thick we couldn’t blink. Oh, and Rita’s gorgeously thin, arched brows!” You wiggle yours at me. “I’ve been trying to perfect those brows ever since.”

  So, Rita is why you pluck your brows as thin as wire, I think, finding it hard to picture this childlike version of you pretending to be the thing you’ve become.

  We drive a little way out of town, and the jeep stops in front of a house surrounded by fields filled with wide leaves that release a pungent scent into the air. Tobacco, I will later learn. The house looks like a Spanish version of the mansion in Gone with the Wind. Only this house seems split between two different eras. It’s as if the sky is eating it from the top down. On the second story, shutters and trim crumble around graying walls and cracked windowpanes. Black mold creeps along the edges of the flat roof, and the stone balcony sags as if it’s about to collapse over the front porch, which, weirdly, looks brand-new. The downstairs pillars and steps are painted a warm blue with crisp white trim around clean glass windows. There’s a decorative white grill over the front door, and a well-groomed cat sits primly watching our arrival.

  A trio of children explode out the front door, and the cat leaps off the porch. A woman rushes after them, her hair falling from a loose bun as she charges toward the jeep. You yank open the jeep door and spill into her arms with a cry of joy. I slide out behind you, the two of you hugging and weeping as the men climb from the jeep, training their eyes off into the horizon. The children, two little boys and a girl who looks about eight or nine, watch us with their hands shoved into their pockets.

  There is a shadow in the doorway, and Grandmother Maria’s commanding figure steps out. All eyes, even the soldiers’, turn to her. Her silver hair is wound on top of her head, each strand coiled and shining like metal as she comes toward me, hips swaying, arms out. Her solid body folds around me, pliable as clay, and I bury my head into her shoulder.

  “Mi hermosa nieta,” she croons, rubbing the flat of her hand in small circles over my back, and something inside me melts. Everything that’s happened over the last few months rises up in gulping sobs. Snot and tears wet the upper sleeve of my grandmother’s blouse, her soft neck against my nose. The familiar smell of vanilla on her skin makes me feel as if I am going to crack and splinter off in a million directions.

  When I finally raise my head, I see that everyone has moved away from us. You stand in the yard with your arm around another woman I don’t know, the three children gathered around you, the woman you’d hugged by the jeep clutching your hand. On the porch are now two teenage girls and a girl who looks about my age. The soldiers have scattered. Two by the road, one near the porch steps. Riel is the only one who still leans against the jeep shuffling his boot in the dirt, arms crossed, eyes on the ground.

  “Come,” Grandmother’s voice is commanding as she nudges me forward, and I am reminded how bossy she is. “Meet your family.”

  It is my cousin Josepha who untangles herself from the crowd, stepping up with a keen smile. She has a high forehead, wide nose and inquisitive large brown eyes. Without hesitating she pulls me into an embrace and says, “I’ve been waiting for you!”

  And in that moment, I know I will love her.

  Chapter Twenty

  * * *

  They Took Him in the Night

  Daughter,

  This is not a homecoming: it is a pulverization of memory. My sisters have become women I don’t recognize; they are now mothers with solid identities and rooted habits. When I left Guanajay, Mercedes was a scrawny twelve-year-old who still played with paper dolls, Danita sixteen and self-conscious and angry, Oneila a woman of twenty-two who had not yet fallen in love. Now, the gap in their ages has closed into comfortable comradery. They are full of opinionated ideas and loud laughter, full of contentment with each other.

  I do not belong to them or to this house anymore, modernized under the hands of Danita and her husband Sergio. Whole walls have been removed, floors stripped, our great-grandparents’ dark, intricately carved furniture replaced with teak and chrome. Bulbous light fixtures dangle overhead, and shag rugs decorate the floor. It is LA incarnated in Cuba, and the only remaining part I remember is the crumbling, second-story exterior.

  Danita, however, is proud of her home. In her immaculate, frilly apron, she leads me from room to room, a manic quality to her movements as she points out each new addition, Eames chairs and Nelson lamps. She desperately wants to impress me, but something weighty is wrought beneath the sheen of her smile. This tour is her crowning glory, and she’s determined to carry it out, never mind the growing restlessness of rebel soldiers armed outside.

  By the time we make it to the living room, where we used to sing along to the radio, I am tired of pretending to like the ostentatious home she’s created. The room is swank and cold, and nothing looks comfortable to sit on. Boxy throw pillows are propped in the arms of white tufted chairs, and the sofa, upholstered in pale p
ink leather, sits off-center from the oval coffee table as if they, too, are distant relatives. Out the window, the ficus tree is the only thing calling to me from the past, its aerial roots still hanging like thickly braided hair from its massive branches.

  I watch you, Nina, with Josepha, my sister’s daughter, huddled beneath that same ficus that sheltered my sister and me so long ago. You whisper close as if you’ve known each other your whole lives. From the porch, Mercedes’s and Mamá’s low voices drift in, and I see Oneila walk past under the window to join them.

  Danita moves around the room, straightening pillows and brushing down the arms of the chairs with the flat of her hand. Of all my siblings, we are the most alike. Her narrow nose, full lips and wide brown eyes mirror my own. It was just luck that landed me on-screen and not her. This show of domesticity from her feels desperate, her strained movements fearful.

  “Danita, what is going on? Why were we escorted home by soldiers?”

  She looks up, her eyes hard and glassy. “Escorted? Oh, no, dear sister, you’ve been arrested.” She waves a frantic hand around the room. “House arrest. I responded to your telex, but it must have been too late to stop you from coming. Did you think they were the Rural Guard?” She laughs, the sound as hard as her eyes.

  She means to say You’ve been gone so long, little sister, you’ve forgotten what our side looks like, and the insult throws me. “I know who they are.” My voice is petulant. “I just thought Castro’s rebels were still in the Sierra Maestra, that Batista had things under control.”

  “The rebels have been flooding out of the hills since August. They’ve lit the country on fire, stopped train lines, drained gas tanks, intercepted telephone calls and telegrams. Bombings and executions are a daily occurrence. Batista has nothing under control.” Danita grinds the heel of her bright red pump into the rug.