En Cuba, la isla hermosa del ardiente sol,
bajo su cielo azul,
adorable trigueña,
de todas las flores,
la reina eres tú.
(In Cuba, beautiful island of the blazing sun,
under your blue sky,
lovely brunette,
of all flowers,
you are the queen.)
Comments
Cocinera Cubana said. . .
Hi, Yarmi! Your post brought back so many delightful memories. My aunt used to make merenguitos and we are from Pinar del Río too, from the Viñales Valley.
Alberto Pena said. . .
Sounds yummy. You must be as sweet as your grandma’s merenguitos, judging by your profile pic. How can I get to meet you personally, princesa? Any chance? I’m single and live in Florida.
Yarmi said. . .
Thanks for commenting, Cocinera. How nice, another pinareña! Alberto, you would have to travel to Havana to meet me in person. But I already have an American boyfriend and I don’t think he would like that. Ciao!
Chapter Two
Under the Shower
When the almendrón reached Salvador Allende Avenue, Yony struggled to move the steering wheel, which wasn’t being cooperative, to the right. The Studebaker swerved and the smell of burned gasoline filled the car.
“Here is your business, Yuma,” Yony said, pointing to a house located on the opposite side of the street.
Matt caught a glimpse of a sign that read la caldosa in green neon letters. It wasn’t his business, though Yarmila jokingly called him “her capitalist partner.” La Caldosa was a paladar, a private restaurant that belonged to a friend of Yarmila’s. Matt had sent money to his fiancée so she could buy a share of it.
“Do you know the restaurant?” he asked.
“You bet, Yuma,” Yony answered with a proud smile. “Most of these little paladares wouldn’t survive without guys like me.”
“Why? Do you bring clients to them?”
“Nah, I bring food to them.”
Matt must have looked perplexed, because Anne hurried to clarify, “Yony is a bisnero,” she said. “A businessman. He sells beef, chicken, eggs . . . whatever supplies the cooks need.”
The word bisneros had originally referred to people who bought and sold items in the black market at a time when private business practices were forbidden—all through the seventies, eighties and early nineties. The term was still part of the Cuban vocabulary, even if some small ventures like restaurants and rentals were allowed.
“I also deal with clothes, TV sets, VCRs and everything under the sun,” Yony added. “You want something, you tell me and I’ll make sure to find it for you.”
Matt smiled, thinking of all the things he could buy for Yarmila, like household items and ingredients for the Cuban dishes she wrote about on her blog—the meals that had attracted him to her in the first place.
“I’ll stay in touch,” he said.
Yony turned the car again, this time running over a cement island—a move that Matt suspected was very much illegal in any country or traffic system—and they drove by the restaurant. Then he made another turn onto Espada Street and stopped in front of a four-story building with peeling walls whose original color was too washed out to tell. It was now gray, with yellow undertones.
Yarmila had been living there for around five months. The first time Matt had visited her, the year before, she was renting a room in Old Havana in a colonial mansion with high ceilings and elaborate moldings on the doors. It was much older than the Espada Street building, but with an aura of faded glory that this one lacked.
Matt picked up his backpack and the roll-on suitcase filled with pots, pans and cutlery for La Caldosa. He had expected to enlist Yony’s aid to carry them upstairs but didn’t have such luck. The young Cuban didn’t volunteer to help, Anne didn’t suggest it either and Matt didn’t feel comfortable asking. Hadn’t he already wasted enough of their time?
Matt offered Yony a twenty-dollar bill. He noticed that the young man had a blue ink tattoo of the Virgin of Charity on his left hand. Though the tattoo was sharp and well done, two small wounds on the back of Yony’s hand made the image look as if she had been stabbed in the chest.
“Thanks, Yuma,” he said, pocketing the money.
Matt managed to get everything out of the car, careful not to ruin the bridal gown.
“Don’t slam the door, man,” Yony warned him.
“See you guys tomorrow at seven at El Refugio,” Anne said.
“Sure.”
“Give my regards to Yarmi.”
“Have fun!”
The couple drove away.
A mature woman in cutoff jeans and a sleeveless white top came out of the building as Matt stumbled through the door. He put the backpack on the floor and folded the dress over his right arm, inhaling the faint floral notes that the fabric gave off. He had gotten the gown at a Buffalo Exchange store for three hundred dollars—a bargain, the salesgirl assured him, considering that it was a Maggie Sottero. Matt, who had never heard of the brand, took her word for it. He hoped Yarmila didn’t mind the fact that the dress wasn’t new.
“Are you lost, compañero?” the woman asked Matt.
“I’m looking for Yarmila Portal.”
“Ah, you are her boyfriend!” The woman got closer to him and patted his back as if she had known him forever. “Welcome! Yarmi told me about you. So nice to finally meet you in person!”
“Are you a friend of hers?” Matt asked, pleasantly surprised.
“More than that. I’m sort of a mother to that girl. Come on, I’ll help you.”
She grabbed Matt’s backpack.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” he protested.
Despite her youthful outfit and bubbly attitude, the woman was over sixty years old and didn’t look strong.
“No big deal,” she replied. “You have your hands full with the other stuff. I’m used to carrying buckets of water all the way to the fourth floor. By the way, I am Fefita.”
“Nice to meet you, Fefita. I’m—”
“Mateo, the journalist! See, I already knew your name. You are famous! Now, follow me. Her apartment is on the third floor.”
The woman moved fast. Her short red perm bobbed up and down like the head of a happy hen.
“Cojones!” a man’s voice thundered from the second floor. “The water pressure is weaker than my grandfather’s piss! What the hell is going on?”
“We’ve been getting just a squirt of water since yesterday,” Fefita explained. “I’m afraid we’ll have to fix the pump again. Last time it cost three hundred pesos and we had to wait a week for the mechanic to show up. No water for a week, imagine that, Mateo! No baths, no laundry, no toilet flushing . . . It was a horror show.”
Matt felt more at ease now—there was something reassuring about the way Cubans talked to total strangers, sharing with them what at times seemed like too much information. He remembered it from the previous year, how Yarmila and other people had trusted him, even if they didn’t have any reason to.
They had reached the third floor. Fefita knocked on a door marked with the number six.
“Yarmi, come and greet your príncipe azul!” she yelled.
Had she called him “blue prince”? Matt had never heard the term but assumed that it meant Prince Charming. He smoothed over the bridal gown and thought of Yarmila’s body filling it.
“Such a beautiful dress,” Fefita said, eyeing it with interest. “It looks like a meringue cake. But I didn’t know that you guys were getting married. When is the wedding?”
Matt pretended to cough in order to gain time. It could take weeks, or even months, for all he knew about Cuban bureaucracy. But first and foremost, the wedding depended on Yarmila’s final answer to his proposal.
He shrugged and said, “Oh, soon.”
Fefita knocked on the door again. “Where is this girl? Isn’t she expecting you?”
“Yes, of course,” Matt mumbled. “I mean, no. Not here.”
She looked at the dress, then back at him, and shook her head. They waited a few minutes. Or perhaps only seconds, but they stretched interminably for Matt.
“She may still be at the airport,” he said, annoyed. “I should have stayed there. But those two insisted so much that—”
Fefita turned the doorknob and opened the door.
“Yarmila!” she called.
No one answered.
“Let’s go in anyway,” she said.
They walked into a living room furnished with a rattan sofa, a Soviet-era TV set with tall legs, and a round coffee table. A heavy blue Frigidaire Power Capsule hummed near the door. An old wooden ironing board had been placed in front of the refrigerator, blocking the access to it. The kitchen area was small—filled completely by the cast-iron stove, porcelain washbasin, cracked countertop, garbage can, plastic table and chair.
The apartment was around six hundred square feet. Yarmila had been so excited about moving to her “new” home that Matt had come to think it was an improvement over her previous one, which it wasn’t. It reeked of something rotten. He pretended to ignore the smell, but Fefita held her nose in disgust.
“It stinks to high heavens. Fo!”
There were two books on the coffee table. Matt looked at the titles: Seventeen Moments of Spring, a novel by a Russian author, and Cocina al Minuto, a collection of Cuban recipes that Yarmila often quoted on her blog posts.
“What a mess,” Fefita said from the kitchen. “How long has this damn chicken been here? Ay, coño, look at that bag of sugar. It’s full of ants!”
She stabbed the offending items with a two-pronged fork and threw them into the garbage can.
Matt went into the bedroom. There was a bed—neatly made and covered in an olive green bedspread—a dresser, and a computer. An opaque oval mirror hung on the wall. He noticed the oversized bags under his eyes, his limp, thinning blond hair, and his chapped lips. He wondered, like a nervous highschooler, if Yarmila would still like him.
The monotonous sound of a shower was the only noise inside the apartment. Fefita, who had followed Matt, was saying, “Ah, here she is! I don’t know how she has enough water pressure to take a shower because I don’t, for sure. Hey, girl, hurry up! You have company.”
Nobody answered, just the steady and ominous falling of water.
The wedding dress still draped over his arm, Matt approached the bathroom and opened the door. Then he saw Yarmila, lying down in the bathtub under a flow of water, in a soaked yellow dress, with a strangely calmed expression carved on her marble-like face.
Chapter Three
The Seguridad Man
There was a brown spot on the wall that at first reminded Matt of a map of Southern California; then it mutated to resemble Fefita’s red perm and finally turned into a sketch of Yarmila’s lifeless body. The shape-shifting spot graced the left corner of a cell in the Centro Habana police station known as Unidad 13. But the memory of Yarmila’s wet corpse was too much for Matt and he started to sob, mourning the loss of his Cuban fiancée and the new life he had hoped to build with her.
When they’d discovered the body, Fefita’s cries had attracted other neighbors—Matt recognized the man who had yelled “cojones” by his voice; he was now repeating the same word in frightened undertones. A police car had arrived. Two cops had brought him and Fefita to the Unidad and separated them. “Someone” would see him soon, he was told. He had been waiting for an hour in the cell, sitting on a hard cement bench. The other bench, across from him, was covered in dark stains. The floor needed to be swept and it smelled like urine and mold.
Matt recalled the journey that had brought him from his unpretentious but comfortable Chula Vista home to a Cuban jail. He worked for El Grito de San Diego, a biweekly, bilingual tabloid that claimed to be all about “border news, culture and entertainment” but, more often than not, devoted the majority of its pages to kidnappings, arsons, killings, and the perennial narco wars in Baja California. The editor and owner, Tijuana-born, San Diego-raised Felipe Estrada, had hired Matt as a copy editor for both the English and the Spanish sections, but the operating budget was so scant and Estrada so persuasive that soon Matt was a feature writer too, despite his initial resistance.
“Don’t be a pendejo,” Estrada insisted. “Lend me a hand here. Don’t you see that I need to fluff up the pinche paper?”
“If I were to write, I’d be a serious journalist, not a hack,” Matt replied.
“We can sign your articles as El Gringo Chingón to protect your good name.”
But Matt refused to sensationalize the news or to hit the Tijuana streets in search of printable crimes. In truth, he was afraid of messing with the wrong crowd and ending up the subject of a yellow journalism piece himself. Finally, Estrada put him in charge of the kitchen page. Once a week Matt found a chef to interview and write about—not a bad gig, as he often got a free lunch out of it. His favorite places were San Ysidro greasy spoons like El Toro Bravo, “home of the best shrimp tacos,” and Miguelina’s Burrería at Otay Mesa, which made the meanest chicharrón burritos in town.
Despite El Grito’s less than pristine reputation, Matt’s pieces got around and he soon landed a monthly column in Foodalicious, a magazine associated with the Culinary Institute of America. Since the Foodalicious editor wasn’t interested in taco stands but in “exotic” cuisines, Matt found himself casting his net wider. After meeting with the chef at Andrés, a popular Cuban restaurant in San Diego, Matt began searching the internet for more recipes from the island. And then he discovered Yarmi Cooks Cuban, a Havana-based blogspot.
There were few Cuban blogs at that time; some were in Spanish and focused on social issues, written by government opponents. Matt, who had always felt a quiet sympathy for Fidel Castro, avoided them. But he also found the official newspapers boring and too proselytizing. Yarmi Cooks Cuban was a breath of fresh air: though she wrote about food, her posts were spiced up with personal touches and stories about her life. Her English, if not perfect, was good enough to be understood. Once they became virtual friends he volunteered to help her, correcting some misspelled words and incorrect prepositions.
They bonded over Cuban dishes, exchanging recipes by email, talking on the phone, and sharing meals when they met in Havana. She had only asked him for one thing—a bottle of extra virgin olive oil—when he visited Cuba the first time. Yet she also used lard freely. Like most Cubans, Yarmila regarded pork in all its permutations as the pinnacle of gastronomic joy.
Matt encouraged her to write a feature for Foodalicious. He had pitched the story to the magazine editor, who thought it would be a hit. Yarmila promised him a piece addressed “to the Yuma public” if Matt, in turn, would write one for her blog about his Cuban experience. He loved the idea, hoping it marked the beginning of a collaboration that blended love, food and words. But that was something else that wouldn’t happen now, he reminded himself, shifting on the hard bench. Another broken dream.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Fri, Jan 22, 2003 1:17 pm
Subject: Re: CIA story
My dear, dear Yuma,
I love your letters, even if they come by email—a very impersonal means of communication, in my opinion. But algo es algo, dijo el galgo. Something is something, said the hound. Don’t ask me what the hound has to do with it. Most Cuban sayings make no sense!
I look forward to writing the story. But I will wait until you come so we can work on it together.
I am thinking of that Mexican dish you told me about, shrimp enchiladas. We could explain the difference between enchilada here and in Mexico. No chiles in Cuba.
I bet that my readers (and yours!) will be surprised.
As for that hot “habanero chile” you mentioned, I’ve never heard of it. We have red and green pimientos, bell peppers, but they are very mild.
Have you already bought your ticket? Let me know so I can wait for you at the airport. Later we either stay in my apartment or rent my friend Isabel’s penthouse that is more comfortable than my little place.
Her restaurant is going swell. Isabel is so grateful that you are bringing us all those gadgets. I just don’t want you to spend a lot of money. We are used to make do with what we have, and that is that.
Spicy kisses from your Yarmi
A tall twenty-something man came in. He wore civilian clothes but his buzz cut lent him a military air. He was carrying Matt’s passport, which had been taken away along with the rest of his belongings. Was the man a consular officer, a fellow American who had come to Matt’s rescue? Matt let that hope glitter in his mind like the iridescent shell that Yarmila had found at El Mégano Beach the year before.
“Hi,” Matt said in English.
“Buenas tardes, compañero,” the man replied in Spanish. Matt’s shell burst to pieces. “I am Pedro.”
He didn’t add a last name.
“Do you speak Spanish?” Pedro asked.
“Yes.”
“Still, we can converse in your native tongue if you favor it.”
Pedro’s heavily accented English and peculiar word choices blew away Matt’s last specks of hope.
“Spanish is fine,” he muttered. “We can—converse.”
Pedro sat on the other bench and stared silently at him for a couple of minutes. Annoyed, Matt broke the silence to say, “I want to know why I am detained. If I’m going to be interrogated, I request the presence of an embassy officer.”
But he was far from feeling as confident as he pretended to be.
What if they hold me hostage and use me as a political pawn? That’s what they do in North Korea!
Death Comes in Through the Kitchen Page 2