Death Comes in Through the Kitchen

by Teresa Dovalpage

  “Do they?” Martínez asked, shocked.

  “Haven’t you ever talked to one? They are worse than Seguridad agents.”

  Martínez shook her head. The only American she had ever talked to was Matt and he hadn’t sung the praises of socialism.

  “Yarmi assured me that Mateo was cool,” Carmela said. “Then we didn’t have any more news about her until Wednesday evening, when she was found dead. Poor girl!”

  “Do you have any idea who could have killed her?” Martínez asked.

  Carmela and Pablo looked at each other and said “no” at the same time.

  “Do you know a man nicknamed Pato Macho?”

  “That’s Isabel’s son,” Carmela said, shrugging. “Why would he do it? He’s just a kid.”

  “I didn’t say he did it. I was just asking about him. How well did you really know Yarmila?”

  The couple exchanged another glance. Carmela cleared her throat.

  “Sometimes I had the impression that I didn’t know her at all,” she said. “Yarmila was a closed book.”

  “Everybody says she was talkative and outgoing,” Martínez argued.

  “They’re right. She talked a lot, but didn’t say much, if you know what I’m saying.”

  Martínez didn’t, but Carmela couldn’t or wouldn’t explain that.

  Yarmi Cooks Cuban

  I have heard (from my Yuma boyfriend, of course) that there are special machines out there, sophisticated coffeemakers that are plugged in to electricity.

  It took me a while to understand how they function until I thought of the electric rice cookers, las ollas arroceras that are so popular now. One of my coworkers saved most of her salary for five months to buy one.

  “It does all the work,” she told me. “No need to check the rice every ten minutes to make sure it isn’t burning, no need to add water or salt. La olla knows what to do. So smart!”

  Call me stubborn, but in cooking matters—real cooking matters—this electric stuff doesn’t cut it. The rice made in an olla arrocera lacks something: flavor, sandunga, a bit of salt . . . I find it insipid and dried.

  I’d rather put the time and effort into making it the old-fashioned way. I will post my white rice recipe soon.

  Now for the coffee.

  The best coffee I have tasted in my life is café carretero. A carretero, literally, is somebody who drives an oxen cart. This traditional way of making coffee involves the use of a colador. A colador is a rudimentary contraption made of a cloth filter, la teta (yes, that means tit), and a wooden or metal base that holds it. Once the filter is put in place, it hangs down, resembling the shape of a breast.

  Under the teta we place a mug, preferably one made of aluminum, the same one all the time. That’s el jarrito de café, the little coffee mug. It gets quite dark over the years!

  Start by boiling a cup of water. In the meantime, put four teaspoons of coffee inside the cloth filter. Once water starts simmering, pour it over the coffee and let it drain into the mug.

  That is la primera colada, the first brew, and it is very strong. In many cases, it’s the only one we make. But if you don’t have a lot of coffee, or if too many visitors happen to arrive at the same time, simply repeat the process. You can make two or three coladas.

  Some people like to add sugar to the coffee while it’s being drained, but I prefer to do it later.

  And that, my dear friends, is the true and tried method for making Cuban coffee, café carretero style.

  Yes, it takes time. We have to boil the water and then pour it over the coffee. (Pretending to roll my eyes here.) Uff! Life in Havana is fast. And in La Yuma it is a race, or so I hear. When I find myself lacking in time and patience, I resort to a stove-top espresso maker like the ones you can buy in your country.

  I have come to like the espresso maker. El café tastes almost like coffee made with the teta. Not exactly the same, though. I can’t tell you why. Heating the metal may alter the flavor. Or it boils for too long. Whatever the cause is, there is a difference.

  I encourage you to try my method. It actually takes less time to boil a cup of water than for the coffee inside a coffee maker to percolate. Trust me on that one.

  Before I forget it, do not throw away the coffee grounds! That’s a great fertilizer. I have also used it to clean greasy pots—pots where I have fried something with lard.

  And that’s all for today. I lift my jarrito de café and sing to the rhythm of Juan Luis Guerra and his song “Ojalá que llueva café.”

  Comments

  Maritza said. . .

  My mom doesn’t like American coffee. She calls it agua de borrajas because it is too watery for her taste. She used to make her own coladores when we moved to New Mexico in the seventies. At that time, it was difficult to find espresso makers so we built the holder with discarded pieces of metal. A clean sock replaced the teta. I still remember the aroma of coffee filling our home. It was the smell of Cuba. Thanks for bringing it back.

  Cubanita in Claremont said. . .

  I am thinking of an old Cuban song, Ay, Mama Inés, ay, Mama Inés, todos los negros tomamos café.

  I want to dance and have coffee but I am at work! Keep the posts coming!

  Julia de Tejas said. . .

  I’m going to get me a cup of Café La Llave right now.

  Lucy Adel said. . .

  I am afraid you are too old-fashioned for life in the States. You should stay in Cuba.

  Taos Tonya said. . .

  Chinga, Lucy, what a big mouth you have!

  Yarmi said. . .

  Hola all!

  Happy to bring back such nice memories, Maritza. Cubanita, right on! How could I forget “Ay, Mama Inés,” by Eliseo Grenet? Julia, I still have to try La Llave. Here, we use Café Pilon. Lucy, I’ve never said I wanted to leave Cuba, have I?

  Sugary kisses from my kitchen.

  Chapter Seven

  Café con Leche

  Marlene Martínez had been longing for coffee all day long. Had Carmela and Pablo offered her a cup she’d have happily accepted it, gusanos or not, but they didn’t. On her way back, she enhanced the fantasy with fresh milk, conjuring up the image of a big tall mug of café con leche, with cream on top. Ah, la nata—She loved butterfat. In the eighties, when Marlene was a little girl, she and her brother would run to the kitchen in the mornings, hoping to get there as soon as her mother opened the milk bottle. She was faster and often beat her brother to it. The reward was soft, warm nata mixed with sugar.

  Now she rarely drank milk. When she did, it was only the dried kind from the dollar shops. Her brother, who had fled Cuba on a raft in 1994, lived in Miami and had all the fresh milk and cream he wanted. He had beaten her to it, in the end.

  “Yes, at what price!” she would say to their mother. “I do not envy him.”

  But she resented him because of his desertion. In her eyes, he had betrayed their homeland. She loved him and hated him. She would have liked to hug him and then slap him hard, until he vomited all the American food he had swallowed in nine years.

  Son of a bitch. No offense, Mom!

  Marlene was on her way home. It was around ten blocks from the Unidad, over half an hour by foot, but she knew better than to wait for a bus at five o’clock. Her stomach growled and her briefcase, where she kept all the documents related to Yarmila’s case, felt heavier in her hand.

  Yarmila ate better than most people. Thanks to her Yuma boyfriend?

  Two men catcalled at her. They were vagos, permanently unemployed dudes who hung around Trillo Park hoping that some sort of illicit business would fall on their laps.

  “Hey, pretty girl!” one purred.

  Marlene stopped and stared them down. She didn’t like to be called pretty or complimented in public. She thought that the time-honored Cuban tradition of piropos, or flirtatio
us remarks, ought to be banned. The vagos scurried away.

  Usually they wouldn’t bother her. They respected the uniform, or at the very least were afraid of it. When she wore her civvies, guys felt at liberty to ogle her and make remarks about her behind. Sometimes she wondered if she had joined the police to intimidate men and force them to keep their distance. Her uniform was her armor.

  She soon forgot the incident. Her thoughts returned to the glass of milk.

  Coño, I am getting obsessed.

  Marlene had been reading Yarmi Cooks Cuban posts with help from a dictionary and, occasionally, a coworker who knew more English than she did. All these stories about meringue puffs, grilled steak and caldosa had made her hungry first, then angry. There would be only rice and beans for supper that evening, and, with any luck, a one-egg omelet. On top of that, she was getting frustrated by the case and the Seguridad’s lack of cooperation.

  What’s Jacobo’s problem? Why doesn’t he talk to me? What’s he trying to hide?

  “This is an issue of national security,” he had told her. Which was fine with Marlene, but he wasn’t playing fair. She’d given him all the information the police had collected and he hadn’t reciprocated. Her “new” computer had never been fixed. She didn’t have access to Yarmila’s blog. Why had it taken him so long to print her emails and posts and send them to her? And he probably hadn’t sent all of them.

  She was home. Home, for Marlene Martínez, was a long, narrow house in Hospital Street. The door opened directly to the sidewalk but Soledad, her mother, never bothered to lock it, despite Marlene’s warnings.

  “Why?” Soledad would ask. “There is nothing to steal here and it is hot inside.”

  When Marlene walked in, the smell of recently toasted coffee, freshly ground, welcomed her. She feared an olfactory hallucination, but saw her mother sitting at the table with the big tall café con leche of her dreams in front of her.

  “Mami, where did you get that?” she yelled.

  “Shh!” Soledad stood up, went to the kitchen and came back with another mug. “Don’t talk so loud. Walls have ears! I made one for you too. Here, it’s still pretty warm.”

  “But this milk—?”

  Marlene took the first sip. She closed her eyes and felt transported to Yarmi’s kitchen, as she had imagined it.

  “Don’t ask and I won’t have to tell you.” Her mother sighed.

  Marlene looked into the old woman’s eyes. Soledad had lost her eyelashes and eyebrows during the nineties, when the polyneuritis epidemic broke loose. The hair never came back. Her hands, which always trembled a little, were now wrapped around the glass. In any other moment, Marlene would have refused to share a black-market item. She’d have scolded her mother for dealing with bisneros. That would have been the right thing to do. But she didn’t feel like doing the right thing.

  “You look tired,” Soledad said, pointing to the briefcase that Marlene had dropped on the table. “Why are you bringing work home with you, chica? You need to rest, to take things easy.”

  “Yes, I’m tired,” Marlene said. She had already finished her café con leche.

  “Take a bath. We have no running water now, but I filled two buckets this morning, just in case it doesn’t come back tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  Marlene picked up the briefcase and walked to her room. The uniform felt heavy on her, more carapace than armor now.

  “There is some milk left in the fridge.”

  No, it was her mother who should drink it. She had a hiatal hernia and was supposed to receive dried milk through the ration card, one pound a month, to soothe her jumpy stomach, but it hadn’t been distributed for the last six weeks.

  Marlene sat on her bed, the same one she had slept in since her teenage years, and she scattered the content of her briefcase over the bedspread. She divided the documents into three groups: blog posts, emails Yarmila had exchanged with Matt and her blog fans, and transcripts of the interviews with all “persons of interest” in the case.

  Something is missing here. Maybe comrade inspector will find it.

  Her mother came into the room.

  “They don’t pay you enough to work overtime,” she complained. “Why don’t you come with me to Matilda’s house? She got two new Yuma movies and it’s only ten pesos. Neighbors’ Night, as she says.”

  Matilda, a widow who lived next door, owned a VCR and people went to her house in the evenings to watch American movies—for a fee.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? You don’t have a boyfriend. You don’t have many friends. You don’t have anything else to do. Let’s have some fun. God knows you need it.”

  “I have Duties to fulfill, Mami.”

  Marlene tended to think about work in capital letters.

  “Fulfill them at the Unidad, not at home.”

  She’s right. But I can’t help it.

  “Why have you been so worried recently?” Soledad asked. “What’s eating at you, mija?”

  “It’s a case I can’t get off my mind,” Marlene blurted out. “A young woman who was found dead last week.”

  “I know, poor thing.” Soledad crossed herself, a pre-revolutionary habit that Marlene found annoying. “She worked at La Caldosa, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  Everybody in Havana had heard about Yarmila’s death. If nothing else, the city was relatively safe, Marlene thought as a small comfort. It wasn’t like so many foreign towns where a dead person was a statistic. Here, it was an uncommon occurrence, something that people talked about for months.

  “You are trying to find out who killed her?”

  Usually, Marlene preferred not to discuss work with her mother. But this wasn’t a usual day.

  “I’m doing my best,” she said. “You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

  “People say this and that—but I don’t pay attention to them.”

  Even if she knew something, Marlene suspected her mother wouldn’t share it with her. Soledad wanted her to leave her current job and get a “normal” one. She wanted her to get married, have children, or, preferably, follow her brother to Miami and bring her along. Her mother, she hated to admit, had turned into a gusana.

  Marlene stood up and retrieved a cell phone from her pants’ pocket. It was the only perk of being a cop, in her mother’s opinion. Since they didn’t have a landline, Marlene had been issued a personal phone so she could be available at all times.

  She dialed a number.

  “Listen, Jacobo,” she said firmly. “I need to talk to you first thing in the morning. I want to see all the files you have on Yarmila Portal. Either that or I am not handling the case anymore.”

  She closed the phone.

  The problem with these cell phones is that you can’t slam them.

  “I’ll go with you to Matilda’s tonight,” she said to her mother. “You are right, Mami. I do need a break.”

  “Amen,” Soledad said.

  Yarmi Cooks Cuban

  Lobster enchilada

  Today I am bringing to the table one of my favorite dishes—full of flavor and easy to prepare.

  To avoid misunderstandings, this is different from the Mexican “enchilada,” which, I believe, means something with a lot of chile. Correct me if I am wrong, Julia, as you are the expert in Mexican cuisine.

  For us, “enchilada” is a kind of stew and we make it with lobster, shrimp or crab.

  Lobster is easy to find here. If you live close to the beach, jump in a sailboat, go to the right spot, throw a net and voila! You soon have five or six langostas meekly waiting to become supper.

  Bueno, it isn’t that easy. There is the rather complicated part of cleaning the lobster, cutting away the legs and claws, but I won’t get into that here because . . . I never do it myself. I get my lobster from a fisherman wh
o sells just the tails, washed and ready to be cooked.

  Like many of our dishes, langosta enchilada starts with sofrito. Make it the usual way with chopped onions, garlic, bell peppers, tomatoes, tomato sauce and spices, fried in oil or lard. You can add a bit of sugar, but only a teaspoon.

  While the sofrito is being prepared, cut the lobster tails (four or five will be enough) into three-inch lengths.

  Cook them in the sofrito for five minutes, or until they turn orange, then add half a cup of white cooking wine, salt and pepper. When the mixture starts to boil, let the lobster simmer for around fifteen minutes.

  This is the moment to pour in one cup tomato sauce and a chorrito of vinegar. Let it cook for ten more minutes—lobster should be tender—and serve over white rice.

  I ate lobster enchilada for the first time on Varadero Beach when I was eight years old. My parents were trabajadores de vanguardia, exceptionally productive workers, and got rewarded with a week’s vacation at the Hotel Internacional.

  The hotel is right on the beachfront. I haven’t been back, but I remember it well: a nice air-conditioned room, a huge swimming pool, and the most beautiful coastline. The water had a hundred shades of blue and the sand was so white and powdery. A few times I caught sight of what people from the area called el rayo verde: a green flash that appeared when the sun sank into the ocean. It was magic, I swear.

  Has anybody here visited Varadero?

  Comments

  Julia de Tejas said. . .

  Yummy! An enchilada in Mexico is made with tortillas, salsa, cheese, sour cream, and beef or chicken. I love them. But I’ll try the Cuban version.

  As for Varadero, unfortunately, I haven’t been there. Yet.