Find Me in Havana

by Serena Burdick

  I pull the cardigan on, jabbing the buttons of the sweater closed over my ripped blouse, furious at all of them. These men, my family. None of this should be allowed to happen. None of us should even be here. Mamá should never have come. My sisters and Papa should have left when they had the chance. Now I have to lose everything for them? If the rebels win this war, what’s to stop them from dragging us out back, shooting us and burying our bodies in a ditch? What’s stopping them now?

  Unable to look at my sister or Mamá, I pick up two bowls of steaming soup and march them into the dining room where Riel and Alipio wait to be served, just like that Diaz boy.

  When the rebels leave, the house settles like a thing smashed.

  Mercedes and Danita don’t come out of their rooms, and you and Josepha don’t come out of the closet. Oneila’s daughters put Mercedes’s children to sleep in their own beds, singing them to sleep and hoping they won’t remember the sounds that came from their mamá’s bedroom earlier. After this, those girls make themselves as ugly as possible, leaving their hair tangled and mouths pale, free of lipstick.

  When I go to bed, I find Danita in the bedroom lying in her underwear on top of the covers, her breasts defiantly exposed, her hands resting on her stomach. White stretch marks curve like commas over the soft skin of her belly. I sit carefully next to her. She doesn’t turn to me. I sense that she is not shocked or wounded into submission but rippling with bitterness. Active bitterness. Her hand slides from her stomach, and she finds mine, squeezing it hard.

  “Are you all right?” I whisper.

  “Of course I am all right.” Her breath is fire.

  “Was it awful?”

  “He was a limp rag. Could barely push his way in.” Somehow, I know she is lying. “Che didn’t touch you, did he?”

  “No,” I say. “Not really.”

  Danita pulls herself up, drawing her knees in to her chest, but not before I catch a glimpse of the bruises inside her wrists. She sits, balled naked and tight on the bed. “Fidel Castro has ordered them not to touch you,” she says, and it is without resentment.

  “How do you know?” I think of the frenzied look in Che’s eye, how he pleasured himself, anyway. Does that not count?

  “My new lover told me. Did you not see him on the way out?” Scorn saturates her sarcasm. “You are our only hope, Estelita Rodriguez. Fidel loves his publicity. He seeks allies where Batista loses them. Fidel started scheming the moment your telex alerted them of your arrival. You are a bargaining chip. Which means you will be the one to get us out of here.”

  “How?” I haven’t been able to use a telephone or send a letter since I arrived. Ed knows I’m in Cuba, but he doesn’t know what’s going on here. Even if he did, this will require more than bribery at a border crossing. Edward Adelman would be squashed like a bug under the boot of a man like Fidel Castro.

  “We wait.” Danita’s resolve is rock-hard, her arms iron-tight around her bare knees. “He’ll trade you for something. All you have to do is make sure he trades all of us. I’m not leaving here without Sergio and Papa.” Unclasping her arms, she stands up, opens a dresser drawer and pulls out her husband’s nightshirt, buttoning it over her low-hanging breasts. “I don’t blame you,” she says, and I don’t know if she means for my special treatment now, or if she’s finally forgiven me for leaving when I was fifteen.

  “Danita.” I slide off the bed and move toward her, but she backs away, arms raised.

  “No sympathy. That’s all we need to say on the subject.” She looks like Mamá, her face closed off to the pain. “We’ll talk of the future. What does an American future look like? Do you think you could get me a job at the Copa?” She smiles, and it is genuine.

  “I’ll do you one better and get you a job in Las Vegas. The weather is much nicer.”

  “Oh, yeah? How are you going to do that?”

  I plump the bottom of my hair with one hand and make one of my spectacularly funny faces. If nothing else, I can make Danita laugh.

  She does, slightly, and I pucker my lips and dip my chin over my shoulder like we used to when we were pretending we were Rita de Cuba. “The mayor of Palm Springs is in love with me. He’s even named a street after me. He said all I have to do is say the word and he’ll get me a headlining show in Las Vegas. I’ll tell him it’s a two-act, Estelita and Danita, the Rodriguez Sisters.” I swoop out a hand, drawing our names in the air. “It’s all I can hope for, now that my picture career is over.”

  “I’m sure you’re exaggerating, as always. A Hollywood actress imprisoned under rebel rule will draw plenty of fans.”

  “It won’t get me a job. Rio Bravo is shooting as we speak. I have no doubt I was easily replaced. For every role, there’s a younger, prettier, more committed girl waiting to snatch it from you. Hopefully, Castro doesn’t know I’m not worth much anymore.”

  “Come on.” Danita turns me to face the mirror. It’s the same rectangular mirror Mamá hung in my room, as she promised, after my first show in Havana. It strikes me that Danita didn’t replace it like she had with so many of our childhood furnishings.

  “How do we look?” she says, and I suddenly remember standing with her in this very spot after coming home from seeing El romance del palmar. We had clasped hands and looked at each other’s reflections, and I’d said, “Let’s promise we’ll never be tiresome or strict or boring like Oneila. We’ll be spirited and interesting and beautiful until we die.”

  “I promise!” Danita had cried with conviction.

  In the glass, now, we look pale and puffy-eyed and older than I want to admit. “Not so good,” I say with a laugh.

  Danita scrunches up her face. “Then, we’d better sound amazing.” She raises her hand, inhales and begins to sing “Besame Mucho,” the low notes soft and husky. The sound is like the beginning of a thought, growing richer with each breath until the whole grand idea of our escape echoes around us, sweet and sorrowful.

  I think of watching Rita Montaner on-screen with my sister, how it poured that night, flooding the first three rows of the theater. How the speakers crackled, distorting Rita’s magnificent voice, and the screen went black every time they changed the reel. How none of it mattered, and we sat, transfixed, our feet in a cold puddle, our eyes glued to the screen until the last white flickers of film danced at the end of the reel and the houselights surged on. Even then, we sat, immobile, not wanting it to end.

  My sister is as good as Rita, I think, without jealousy, believing that all we have imagined is truly possible.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  * * *

  Grandfather’s Gun

  Mother,

  After the storm, you and your sisters are different. You are less argumentative, less loud. You turn cold, distrustful eyes on the soldiers, bristling and guarding each other like tigers. If two of you are in the kitchen, the other two are setting the table; if one has gone to do laundry, another follows to help hang it on the line. Auntie Oneila takes her place as the eldest, directing and ordering everyone around. If Tabo and Victor need scolding, she steps in for Auntie Mercedes who has gone soft as butter, her familiar belly laughs silenced. Between you and my Auntie Danita, there’s an intimacy, something firmed up, an acceptance and understanding. Neither one of you leaves the other alone.

  When the soldiers stomp home after dinner to their cement-walled bedrooms, we gather in the living room where you and Auntie Danita sing, determined to keep at it, wrapping us in the sweetness and beauty of your voices where we can suspend all thought, all fear, all worry. Sometimes the songs are funny, comic bits where you make goofy faces and wiggle your bums at each other. This sets us all into fits of laughter. We squeal until it hurts. Laughing as if laughter is the last thing in our control.

  Josepha and I plot great things together: how she’s coming to America with us, and we’ll go to boarding school together. Villa Cabrini Academy would
be tolerable, possibly even enjoyable, if Josepha were with me. She has a way of making me see all sides of a thing. When I told her how much I hated school, she sat down with a sheet of paper and made me list everything bad on one side and everything I could do about it on the other. In the end, school didn’t look so hopeless. We did the same thing with our talents and our looks. Josepha says there are positives about not being attractive.

  “For one thing people take you more seriously. We could be scientists or astronauts. No one cares what you look like if you’re an astronaut. Smart girls are expected to be ugly.”

  “I’m not smart, either,” I say.

  “You’re twelve. How do you know what you are?” She sounds motherly, but I don’t mind. She always makes me feel better about myself.

  The kindness between the aunts trickles down to the cousins. Josepha and I start including Marta in our games, and Lita and Enricua let us use the makeup they abandoned and teach us to tie up our hair at night so it falls out in curls in the morning, with the cautionary warning that we are never to wear it that way around the soldiers. The little boys aren’t always a nuisance, and at bedtime we take turns telling them stories.

  I believe this is normal, that this is what comes from living with people you’ve learned to love. But I am unfamiliar with big families and do not know that kindness made of guilt melts as fast as ice under hot sun.

  * * *

  Christmas is humid, ninety degrees and sunny. The soldiers have left us alone. It doesn’t seem possible those men have families to go home to and holidays to celebrate, but the barracks have been empty for a week. There is no Christmas tree or presents, but we have letters from our uncles in Miami brought by a man named Marco, a friend of Oneila’s husband, who also brings food: rice, beans, plantains and a precious rum cake.

  We are in the kitchen, Oneila and Mercedes huddled together reading their letters, while Grandmother Maria directs the rest of us to light the stove and get out pots to boil water. Our waterlines have been cut off, so we collect rainwater in buckets outside. Tabo and Victor keep sticking their fingers in the rum cake, and Marta slaps their hands away, pretending she’s in charge. Mercedes tells her to take the boys outside, and Enricua goes with her, leaving Lita to the annoying task of sifting through the dry beans for tiny stones so no one breaks a tooth.

  Marco takes a bag of sugar from the pile of food and hands it to Grandmother Maria. “For rice pudding.” He smiles, briefly, his white teeth shining in his dark face before his expression falls.

  “I don’t know how to make rice pudding,” Grandmother Maria says in a tone that seems to have nothing to do with rice pudding.

  Marco takes her hand. “All these years and you still can’t cook?”

  I watch them, wondering how my grandmother and this man know each other and why they are talking in code.

  “Thank your mother for the cake, otherwise we’d have no dessert at all.” She places a hand on Marco’s cheek and says softly, “Tell me.”

  He has a strong face, smooth and unlined and dark as chocolate. He sighs. “There is word of Manuel.”

  The room stops, pots in hand freeze in midair, drawers are held open as we all look at Grandmother Maria, dressed in red for Christmas with a white scarf tied around her silver hair. A few loose strands brush the back of her neck. She lets go of Marco, takes a breath, steps back. “What news?”

  “He is alive, but not well. He’s in the hospital.”

  “Where?”

  “Havana.”

  “Will he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her gaze is forward, her jaw working this information over like food. She drops her voice, but not low enough. “What did they do to him?” Josepha and I look at each other. It doesn’t matter what we hear now. That night in the closet, peeking out the closet door, we saw the man drag Mercedes by her arm, watched her feet slow as he pulled her into the bedroom, heard her pleading for him to stop. We didn’t see or hear Auntie Danita because, by that time, we’d shut the closet door and stopped up our ears. We learned about it later from Lita and Enricua, but Josepha told them to shut up. It wasn’t true, and they weren’t to talk about her mom like that.

  Marco looks helpless at Grandmother, not wanting to tell her. He holds out the bag of sugar as if this will make up for his lack of words. She nods in understanding and takes his sugar offering without any more questions. Auntie Danita sets down the pot she’s holding with a bang on the stove. Water sloshes over the side and hisses into the flame.

  “What of Sergio?” Her voice trembles.

  Marco raises his eyes, but it’s my cousin Josepha he looks at. She stands with her hand in the cutlery drawer. She looks at her mother, and there is a flash of understanding between them, something so thick it’s like coiled rope in the air, the ends held unrelentingly in the hands of mother and daughter.

  There is a silent pulse to the room, heads raised, eyes on Marco. He sets the sugar on the counter and collapses onto a stool. “I didn’t want to tell you on Christmas. Mamá just sent me to deliver food.”

  Auntie Danita’s mouth twitches. “I don’t give a damn what day it is. Tell me.”

  Marco holds her eyes like he held Grandmother’s. “They shot him.”

  A sound between a gasp and a whimper comes from my cousin, and I want to rush to her but her mother gets there first, Josepha collapsing into her arms with great sobs. Auntie Danita holds her, looking up at us with eyes like small, wet stones, but she does not cry. Only once have I seen you cry, at Grant’s funeral, an open weeping that made me uncomfortable, but not nearly as uncomfortable as Auntie Danita’s tearless, glinting eyes.

  You hand me a pitcher of cane juice and tell me, sharply, “Nina, set this on the table,” and the rest of us—aunts, cousins, sisters and mother—spring to life, trying to avoid the inevitable plunge, as if movement, apologies, hard, quick hugs and food preparation will keep us from sliding under the grief.

  Beans cook slowly, and we do not eat for hours. By that time, Josepha and I have spent half the day lying under the ficus tree talking revenge, her emotions raw-edged and exposed.

  “I’ll slit their throats in their sleep.” Her hands are propped under her head, elbows bent at an angle, heat heavy as a blanket over us.

  “Shooting them would be easier.” This is only practical.

  “True. I could get more of them at one time. How could we get a gun?”

  “Maybe they left one behind?”

  I don’t mean for us to actually check, but Josepha bolts to her feet. “You’re right. They might have. Let’s look.” This is a terrible idea, but I follow her across the road toward the barracks, the dirt hard-packed and sun-warmed under my bare feet. Josepha walks with a slow cat stalk, her skirt swinging steadily below her knees. I can see the imprint of grass stamped into her bare calves and the rough edges of her heels.

  She hesitates at the door, a block of wood as formidable as the cement walls on either side. “You’re not really going in there?” I whisper.

  “It was your idea.”

  “I didn’t say we should go in.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll protect you.”

  She’s no bigger or stronger than I am, but for some reason I believe she can protect me. The door opens with a groan, swinging heavily into a dark hallway, the walls skeletal, holding dead air. I picture Mercedes being dragged by that man, his hard, bristled face and glassy eyes. I tug Josepha backward. “What if they left a soldier behind to guard the place?”

  She twists out of my grasp. “That’s stupid. If they were here, it would be to watch us not hide in this building. I’m going in.”

  She steps through the door, her small back disappearing into shadow, and I rush in after her, cold air slipping over my skin as if I’ve walked into a refrigerator. “Why is it so cold?”

  “Shhh.” She puts a finger to her
lips, her face full of ordinary annoyance.

  It is a single-story building, wide and flat, with small square rooms that we peek into. The walls are cool to the touch, the stone floor gritty underfoot. It smells of wet towels and rotting fruit and something sour and sweaty, a smell I will forever after associate with men. There are beds on the floor made from sugar sacks, wool blankets and hard, flat pillows with no pillowcases. Hurricane lamps sit next to the beds, and in the kitchen, we find small plates with candle nubs stuck into melted wax at their centers. There’s a battery-operated radio, which surprises us, and a stove. Apparently, news and hot food are not the reason they invade our house every night.

  We scan the surfaces for a gun, wounded countertops and a rotting wood table, but touch nothing. When a creature scurries in the corner of the kitchen, we jump and run down the hall and out the front door so fast we forget to close it behind us. Under the ficus tree we double over, breathless, red-faced and gasping with fear.

  When Josepha looks up, her eyes are brilliant and teary. “That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Me, too.” My heart thunders in my ears.

  “You’re the bravest friend in the world. I will love you forever.” She hugs me, her arms thin as twigs, her skin damp and tangy with sweat. It strikes me how small she is, how skinny her limbs and narrow her hips. I will think of this in the years to come, how easy it is to snap a body, make it do what you want no matter how thick-spirited a person is inside.

  It is Josepha’s idea to go into our Grandfather Manuel’s room. “He had a gun,” she whispers as we slip unnoticed past the bustle of dinner prep. “I never thought about it before, but when the rebels took him from the house, he was in his bedroom slippers and bathrobe. He couldn’t have taken it with him, which means it has to be here somewhere.”