A couple of blocks later Matt encountered the skeleton of an old building covered in lush vegetation. The shell remained intact, but the interior walls and floors had disintegrated. The balconies opened like eyeless sockets peering into the emptiness inside. Healthy lianas had grown up everywhere. Their green sprouts stood in sharp contrast with the decaying, mold-stricken façade. It looked surreal, like something you’d expect to find in a dystopic movie about a dead civilization.
Matt couldn’t figure out how a structure like that had survived so close to the tourist zone. It might have been destroyed by Hurricane Lili, or Isidore, or any of the tropical storms that routinely swept over the island. People had once lived there, people whose dreams had been crushed—like his.
He walked to El Nacional, one of the most expensive hotels in the city, and ventured into a little cafeteria called Film Corner. The formal restaurant, El Comedor de Aguiar, was closed. At that early hour, there weren’t any foreign guests around, much less natives. A lethargic waitress dressed in blue jeans and tennis shoes took ten minutes to show up.
“What do you want?” she asked sharply.
Matt ordered a café con leche and a medianoche, a ham and cheese sandwich. Both were below Villa Tomasa’s standards. The bread was hard so he picked at the ham and cheese and ordered a second cup of coffee with milk. The restaurant smelled like stale cigarette smoke and fried dough, which killed his appetite. In a brochure left behind on the table he read that the hotel had counted Johnny Weissmuller, Fred Astaire, and Ava Gardner as guests in its golden days. He also found a copy of Juventud Rebelde. The front page was devoted to the upcoming celebration of “the first defeat of imperialism in America.” It wasn’t until the third paragraph that he realized the story was about the Bay of Pigs invasion.
After breakfast, he lingered in the lobby. The place reeked of bygone opulence—a grandfather clock that didn’t work, tarnished brass fixtures, high ceilings with heavy beams, and a long, dusty tiled corridor. There was a Hall of Fame with photos of celebrity guests, past and present. Like the restaurant, it was closed. The bored, unfriendly faces of the reception clerks made Matt appreciate Román’s hospitality even more.
There was an Aeroméxico counter that advertised flights to Tijuana. There was nobody there, but he made a mental note to come back as soon as he had recovered his passport. If it happened before his intended return date on April 1, he could change his ticket there.
Matt returned to Malecón Drive and passed Café Arabia. The sign was turned off and it looked like a regular house. On the next corner he discovered a small shop that advertised regalos, gifts. He went in, out of curiosity, and spent the next hour perusing coconut monkeys, T-shirts with the Cuban flag, bottles of Legendario rum, and colorful ceramics. He also sniffed some cigars. Though he had never been a serious smoker, he couldn’t help buying a robust Partagás. He enjoyed it on the premises, under the approving smile of the store employee. The old man, dressed in a blue guayabera and white pants, asked, “How is it, señor?”
“Great!”
Matt wasn’t just being polite. He liked it so much that he also got a fruity, tangerine-flavored Romeo y Julieta, and a vanilla-scented Montecristo. He was tempted by a Cohiba, which was supposed to be a favorite of Castro’s, but the sixty-dollar price tag discouraged him.
A light rain began to fall. Matt hurried to Villa Tomasa. Anne wasn’t there. She had gone out with Yony, Román told him, and said she would come back late, or not at all. “She seems very much into him,” he added with a sneer.
“Ah, women! Then they talk about us.”
“I feel sorry for Anita,” Román said, getting serious. “She is like so many tourists who believe everything these smooth talkers tell them. You should warn her.”
“She is old enough to know better.”
Matt went back to his room and tried to read a 1957 Reader’s Digest article about Cardinal Mindszenty, but couldn’t concentrate on it. He was still thinking of Yarmila. He went over their conversations, the few days they had spent together, her messages to him, scrutinizing them and looking for hints of deceit. But he found nothing. She always replied to his emails within hours. She seemed to be waiting by the phone every time he called her.
Now, I don’t remember seeing a phone at her place. I would have surely noticed one of these big, old-fashioned ones. Would the number still work?
He went to the dining room and dialed Yarmila’s number. Absurdly, for a minute, he expected her to answer.
“The Cubacel number you are calling has been disconnected,” a recording said.
“What’s Cubacel?” Matt asked Román.
“A phone company,” his host said. “But only for cell phones.”
“Are they very common here?”
“Not really. In most cases, the service has to be paid in CUCs.”
“So they are expensive.”
“Very. I wouldn’t even dream of having one.”
Matt went back to his room, mulling it over.
She could have used the money I sent her to get herself a cell phone. No, wait. I started calling this number before we met in person. She’d given it to him in an email a few weeks after they’d started exchanging messages, when he’d told her he was coming down for a visit. She still lived at the Old Havana apartment then. If she wasn’t working at La Caldosa yet, where had she found the money to pay for a cell phone?
At 7:00 p.m. Román settled in on the lounge chair to watch Attack of the Clones with five carefully rolled joints at hand. Matt turned on the TV in his room. It offered two options—a Venezuelan soap opera where two women screamed at each other and a Cuban documentary showcasing the new housing developments on the Isle of Youth. He remembered the feature Estrada had suggested on Havana’s Chinatown. He asked Román for directions.
“That’s too far away,” he said. “You’ll need to take a taxi. But everything is overpriced there. And there are no Chinese left in Chinatown.”
“Where are they?”
“They fled Cuba when Fidel took over. They knew exactly what was coming up next.”
Matt walked briskly for the five blocks that separated Villa Tomasa from Café Arabia, avoiding the street holes that had become mud puddles with the rain.
The show was about to start. That night Taty had chosen to impersonate Sara Montiel, a Spanish singer who had been in the news a few months before, when she wedded a Cuban videotape operator forty years her junior. Their May-December romance even merited a mention in Granma, the official Communist Party newspaper.
The audience went wild as Taty sang “Fumando espero,” a tango that had been a hit in the fifties. This time, either because the song was in Spanish or Taty was more familiar with the rhythm, he sounded better. Halfway through the song, he produced a cigarette and started to smoke, walking around the tables and caressing shoulders and arms. He looked feminine and desirable in a high-waisted red pencil skirt and a black top sprinkled with sequins.
Matt listened, enthralled by the illusion that Taty had created. When the singer reached the table, he bent over and said, “I knew you’d be back—mister.” He smelled like gardenias, musk and sweat. “I’ll be with you soon.”
Matt whistled the tango tune. He ordered a shot of rum, a Coke, and chicken wings. The rum arrived promptly, not so the Coke—that never came. The chicken wings, las alitas, were a real treat, crispy and wrapped in a piquant sauce that had hints of cumin, red pepper and garlic. He regretted not having brought his remaining cigars to a place where entertainers and patrons smoked with happy abandon. The Romeo y Julieta would have been perfect to accompany the alitas and Taty’s show.
Five songs and many shouts of perra later, the musical part of the show was over. Soft jazz played in the background. Matt ordered more chicken wings and another shot of rum.
As soon as Taty was done walking around the room, collecting compliments
and bills, he came over again.
“How are you?” he asked. A mischievous twinkle in his heavily lined eyes contrasted with the formality of the question.
“Fine, all things considered,” Matt answered. “And yourself?”
“Happy to see you, mi santo.”
“Am I your santo, honey?” Matt said.
The rum, whirling and running through his veins, gave him the necessary dose of courage to utter the last word. He had never called another man “honey,” much less its Spanish equivalent, cariño.
“My santo, my friend, or whatever you want to be,” Taty replied.
Matt didn’t know how he was expected to answer. He had always had enough trouble flirting with women.
“Friend will be good—to start,” he said.
“And to end? But we do not want this to end, do we?”
The conversation went on, awkward at first and then smooth and easy, stretching like the liana vines Matt had seen that morning over the skeleton of someone’s dream. And yet he was self-conscious, nervous, afraid of being found out . . . What would Lieutenant Martínez or Agent Pedro say if they knew where he was, and with whom? But when Taty’s fingers closed around his, he didn’t doubt it anymore. He saw a beautiful woman with shiny black hair and pouty glossy lips, a pretty girl who smelled of gardenias and sweat. He squeezed Taty’s hand in return, ignoring its calloused palm and feeling a delicious pain when Taty’s manicured nails drove through his flesh. The music stopped.
“I have to wrap this up,” Taty whispered. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
He got back on stage. It was time for the sketch. Matt hoped that he would keep it short and sweet.
“Locas, thanks for being here!” Taty opened his arms. “Thanks for allowing us to embrace you with the magic of one thousand and one nights!”
He blew a kiss at the audience.
“You didn’t expect this, did you? Sarita Montiel, the divine one! The first I time I saw Saritísima in La Violetera, I fell in love with her. I was ten years old and my mom, bless her soul, had taken me to the matinee at the Alameda movie theater. A place I would return to as a teenager because it had the darkest restrooms and the biggest crowd of hairy, handsome, and very married men looking for—but that is another story.
“That day I came home all happy and giddy and locked myself in my room. I mean, in the room I shared with my brother, a super macho who ate crocodiles alive, and my bitchy older sister. I tried to make myself look like Sarita with red lipstick and my sis’s best Sunday dress. I pranced in front of the mirror and started to sing . . .
“Alabao, loquisimas! I must have been really inspired because I didn’t see it coming. When I least expected it, the door was kicked open and my father appeared in the threshold, his face as red as my lipstick and the veins in his neck bulging with fury.
“‘No son of mine is going to grow up a fucking fag!’ he yelled, towering above my eighty-pound frame. ‘I’ll teach you to be a man even if it is the last thing I do on earth!’
“Dad suspected I had ‘a little problem,’ but he’d never caught me in the act like that. I knew I was in trouble. He had hit me before, many times. He hit my siblings too. I thought he would kill me.”
Matt looked around, uncomfortable. Everyone else was engrossed in the story. Some were even smiling. He didn’t get it. Did people find that funny?
Taty went on, “I was saved by the bell, or rather by my mother, who hurried from the kitchen wielding a carving knife. She got herself between my dad and me. ‘Leave the kid alone!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t you see how skinny he is? Don’t you dare touch him!’
“‘I’d rather see him dead than maricón!’
“She grabbed him by the arm and said in a low voice, but loud enough for me to hear, ‘So he is a maricón, so what? What are you then, when you ask me to insert a rubber bulb in your ass at night, cochino?’”
The audience roared.
“Later Mom would try to convince Dad that I was born that way, but he wouldn’t hear any of it. I was his biggest disappointment.
“So Pepito’s best friend asks him, ‘Is it true that seventy-five percent of maricones were born that way?’ And Pepito replies, ‘Sure thing, man.’ ‘What about the other twenty-five percent?’ his friend asks. ‘Ah,’ Pepito responds, ‘those were sucked in.’”
When the sketch was over, Taty joined Matt at the table and another performer took his place. It was, or looked like, an older woman with a long blonde mane.
“Who is that supposed to be?” Matt asked.
“Rosita Fornés before the times of cholera.” Taty laughed. “She has aged badly, but the bitch was perrísima until ten years ago. Nothing like Sarita, but good enough.”
Matt watched the impersonator without much interest. When Taty hinted that it was getting late—he didn’t say for what—he heartily agreed. They left Café Arabia together and Taty wrapped himself around Matt.
“Where are you staying, my santo, now that you left Isabel’s penthouse? Ay, wasn’t the old cow pissed off!”
“Not very far from here.”
“In a hotel?”
“No. In another casa particular.”
“Do you think the casa’s owner will let me stay? They don’t like Cubans, as a rule.”
“I’ll make sure you get in,” Matt replied.
Taty smiled and squeezed Matt’s arm. “You won’t regret it.”
“Who is Pepito?” Matt asked after a while, to break the silence that was making him edgy. “You mentioned him last time too.”
“You have a good memory, my Mateo.” Taty smiled. “He’s a young boy who says the darndest things.”
“Is he a real person?”
“No. But everybody knows a Pepito at school, at work. Cuba is full of them! He’s just a twerp, funny and sharp-tongued.”
They walked together, arm in arm, to Villa Tomasa. Taty stepped gracefully over the mud puddles and street holes.
Matt hoped and prayed that Román wouldn’t notice his companion’s big hands and Adam’s apple, that he wouldn’t get mad, that he wouldn’t demand any immediate payment . . . What if he thought that Taty was a jinetera and refused to allow him to stay? But Román, stoned and sleepy, listened with a straight face to Matt’s incoherent excuses about “bringing a friend in.”
“Come on in,” he mumbled. “No big deal.”
Relieved, Matt hurried to get Taty past the living room, blushing at the thoughts that his urgency might instill in his host’s foggy mind. But he reminded himself that Román was seeing him with a beautiful Cuban girl. And what could be more natural than that?
“This is a cool place,” Taty looked at the leather sofa and the fake fireplace. “A real casa particular, not like ‘the penthouse.’ I still remember your face when you first saw it!”
Matt closed the door to his room. Under the amber light cast by the art-deco lamp, Taty had recovered some of his most conspicuous masculine traits. There was a five o’clock shadow under the slightly smeared makeup.
“Why are you doing this?” Matt asked.
“Because I like you,” Taty said. “Don’t think it’s about money because I don’t want a cent, eh! I’ve had a crush on you since we met at Isabel’s.”
“No, that’s fine. I meant cross-dressing, if you don’t mind me asking. I didn’t know it was a common practice here.”
“It’s more common now than ten years ago. Well, ten years ago I was a little kid living in the rear end of the world so I wouldn’t have known any better. I came out when I moved to Havana. As I said tonight, I started early on, but back then no one talked about ‘cross-dressing.’ People like my dad just called you a maricón de mierda if they caught you in drag.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“That’s why I’ve settled in Havana, where they are more tolerant. And I do it because�
�coño, because I enjoy it. I like seeing myself as a girl. I am a girl, deep down. But does this matter now? Why are we wasting time with so much blah-blah-blah?”
His hands started to caress Matt’s back, relieving tension and unknotting his fears.
“You’re right, mi santo,” Matt said, yielding to Taty’s soothing touch.
At seven thirty Taty woke Matt up singing a Sara Montiel song softly in his ear. They made love once more, and Taty was gone.
Yarmi Cooks Cuban
Pan de plátano—a banana bread feast at work
One of my favorite snacks is pan de plátano, banana bread, which I made last week for my colleagues.
Yes, my colleagues. Some of my dear readers have asked what I do when I am not cooking, or blogging about food. Or eating. As you must know by now, I like to eat!
This is a good time to share with you, my virtual friends, that besides “cooking Cuban,” Yarmi also has a regular job, like so many other women in our country.
It has nothing to do with food.
I work at the Institute of Literature and Linguistics. I am one of the youngest researchers here—and I say “here” because I write this post at work, in my office, during lunchtime. My job consists of reading and classifying all the English-language materials that are sent to our offices. I catalogue the books and magazines and send them to the corresponding area of our library, named Biblioteca Fernando Ortiz after a distinguished Cuban ethnographer.
If there is something particularly interesting, I propose it for translation and possible publication. Sometimes I get to do the Spanish version and the articles are published in the Institute’s very own newsletter.
The Institute is close to my house so I don’t need to take a bus. An advantage if you live in Havana, where distances are long and buses scarce! I can go back and forth in twenty minutes.
Last week, I brought in all the necessary ingredients to prepare pan de plátano, a loaf of banana bread. They are easy to find: two cups of flour, one teaspoon of baking soda, a pinch of salt, half a cup of butter, four tablespoons of brown sugar, a beaten egg, and three medium-sized ripe bananas.
Death Comes in Through the Kitchen Page 22