Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  “Think about it,” Patricia said as she pulled the VW out on the street and headed home. “Don’t you think you give people license to disrespect Gina by not saying anything?”

  “But Patricia, c’mon,” I protested. “What am I gonna say all of a sudden? ‘Oh, please, don’t offend my girlfriend’? I mean, it’s not like anybody’s that comfortable with the situation as it is.”

  There was a cab behind us almost immediately, blinking his brights into our rear view mirror. We slowed down, a little curious about his signal because we didn’t seem to be doing anything wrong. He pulled up beside us, but the driver—a smooth-faced Asian man (Indian or Pakistani perhaps?)—frowned when he saw us and kept going.

  Patricia sighed. “Juani, you do pretty well walking that weird line between not being in the closet and not being in people’s faces, but if you think that it’s better to sidestep the nature of your relationship with Gina in order to protect it—you’re obviously wrong,” she said, taking a sharp turn and jolting us onto a side street. “Gina’s telling you you’re already in trouble. Don’t you get it?”

  The more Patricia lectured me, the angrier I got. “Listen,” I said, pressing my body against the car door as we sped toward my apartment. “I’m not the one who’s saying anything, I’m not doing anything, and I’m not feeling anything racist or classist or whatever else. That’s what should matter to Gina: me, not my family. You think I like or agree with everything her friends talk about? No way!”

  Patricia spun the VW into the alley next to my house and came to a sudden and dead stop. My head snapped back and forth.

  “Do her friends call you names to your face?” she asked me, her own neck ramrod straight.

  “No, but, believe me, they say plenty of other things that let me know they don’t like me,” I said.

  “Because you’re Cuban?”

  “Yeah, sometimes because I’m Cuban—even Gina does it—and sometimes they spew out little homophobic things,” I explained. “I let it go, though.”

  “Why?” Patricia asked.

  “Because it’s not worth it.”

  “To whom?”

  I popped open the car door and jumped out. I needed air, I needed to breathe. “Why are you doing this to me?” I asked.

  Patricia pulled on the emergency brake and climbed out of the car. Its little engine continued to chug in place. She crossed her arms on top of the VW’s curved roof. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just trying to help but I can see I’m not doing very well.”

  My chest was puffy and tight. I thought about all the times Gina had just swallowed her tongue around my father and his crazy duct tape stories, how she’d put up with my Tía Zenaida making snide comments about communists, how Pucho’s salacious friends hung all over the laundromat staring her up and down every time she came in to see me. And I realized all I’d ever done is roll my eyes, shrug, ask her to ignore the assaults, or whispered something under my breath that only I and, sometimes she, could hear.

  “I’m not good at this kind of thing, Patricia,” I finally admitted, letting the air out of my lungs. There are so many things I’m not good at.

  She smiled indulgently, her chin resting on her arms. “At what?”

  “At these kinds of conversations. I’m not good at telling Mami to stop being racist, ‘cause it’s impossible. Or telling Tía Zenaida not to be anti-communist—that’s crazy, it’s like her whole reason for living. And I’m not good at telling Jimmy not to make Puerto Rican jokes around Gina because…well, I mean, he’d laugh.”

  “So?”

  I threw my hands in the air and spun my whole body around in frustration. The street was gray and cool and the faint sound of radios and TVs could be heard seeping out of windows. “He’ll make me go through hell if I say anything to him, okay?” I said. “He’ll go on and on about—”

  “About what?”

  “Well…that…” I could see it: Jimmy chortling in the laundromat, making faces, grabbing his dick as if it were a southern sheriff’s water hose. I cringed. “That…I’m…” I was up against a wall. I felt my lips puckering but I couldn’t get any words out of my mouth, as if it had been sewn shut with a thick dissolving stitch that was just now turning into some sort of goo.

  “That what?” Patricia demanded, impatient. “That you’re…oh god…Juani, no…” My mouth worked to make a sound. “That you’re…pussywhipped?” Patricia finally spit the word out. She pushed herself away from the VW in disgust. “My god, Juani, what kind of macho game are you playing with him? Who cares what Jimmy thinks? Who cares what anybody but you and Gina think? Juani, c’mon, be a grown up. Get a grip on reality. What’s really important here?”

  I felt naked. And ridiculous. And I hated Patricia just then. I bit my lower lip. felt it swell like a balloon, pushed my hands in my pockets and stomped off. I couldn’t take anymore.

  One night—and this was the night—several of Gina’s friends came over to her place for a little party. It was Gina’s mother’s saint’s day and Gina was making a huge vat of rabbit stew (her mom’s favorite). Because the stew had been on the stove for hours, the house had a warm, comforting smell of garlic and onions, basil and tomatoes.

  Curiously, we were all talking in Spanish, as if rehearsing for Gina’s mom, who preferred her island language to the English that came so much easier to her daughter and her friends. Eventually one of these pals said to me, “You must be Cuban, I can tell by your accent.” I nodded. And then she asked, “Are you a good Cuban or a bad Cuban?”

  But before I got a chance to say anything, Gina—laughing—said, “Baaaaaaaad Cuban!” And they all laughed.

  I shrugged and tried to smile. I was sure there was some joke here I wasn’t getting, or that was at my expense in a big way, but I was determined to let it roll. I figured it was my penance, and maybe the universe’s way of balancing things out. I looked at Gina for some comfort but she wasn’t looking back: She was stirring her stew, her head tossed back and laughing, eyebrows arched, mouth wide open and red, very red. I’d seen that expression—and the sweet red of that mouth—so many times in private, just the two of us, that I’d grown to believe it belonged only there, in the space only we created. Seeing her here, now, loose and laughing before strangers (I didn’t know them) made me shiver down to my boots. Were we still together, connected in any way? Was there anything left between us? Why had she invited me? Why wasn’t she looking at me?

  “You mean you’re a gusana?” asked Gina’s friend, her face not hiding too well her loathing. Her name was Hilda. The way she was standing, her face seemed to be next to a picture of Lolita Lebrón, one of the Puerto Rican independentistas who had tried to assassinate Harry Truman.

  I smiled and shrugged again. I knew I couldn’t say anything.

  “Oh-oh, cat got your tongue?” Hilda teased. She and Gina exchanged a knowing look.

  “No,” I finally said, “I just don’t like that word.”

  “What word?”

  “Gusana.”

  “Why’s that?” she asked, leaning her hip on the kitchen counter. Lolita hovered next to her.

  I took a deep breath. “I find it offensive,” I said.

  Hilda smiled patronizingly. “What would you prefer?”

  “Anything but that,” I said, trying to avoid whatever trap she might be setting. There was complete silence in the kitchen now, with everybody tuned in to the exchange between her and me. The only thing I could hear was the wooden spoon turning the stew as Gina stirred and a kind of gurgling from the pot.

  “Do you like Cuban-American?” Hilda asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  Her eyebrow went up. “Really?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “And other times?”

  I felt as if I was under a hot light, my face red. My palms itched. I felt my intestines knotting and twisting.

  “Cuban, cubana, whatever.”

  Somebody laughed a little but I don’t know who. It wasn’t a mean
laugh, that I could tell. Hilda’s eyebrow came down and she smiled, but she wasn’t warm at all. Gina was still stirring, still avoiding my eyes. “Whatever?” Hilda asked. “Man, that’s scary!”

  “Hey, she’s a woman with flexibility,” said Ana, another of Gina’s friends. The tension in the kitchen was palpable so I was grateful for her intervention. I looked to thank her but she turned away, gently slapping my shoulder in the process. “What do you want to drink, eh, cubanita?”

  “A Materva,” I said, relieved. Ana smiled up at me, nodding acknowledgment as she handed me a cold can from the fridge.

  “¿Y tú?” she asked Hilda, forcing her off her soapbox. Hilda looked around for a way to stay up there a while longer but then the doorbell rang.

  “¡Mi mamár!” exclaimed Gina, dropping the wooden spoon onto a paper towel and racing out of the kitchen to get the door.

  Her friends scattered, some following behind her; others left to add silverware to the table, stir the stew, and arrange the flowers. I would have thought we were back on track for the evening, to thinking about Gina’s mother’s saint’s day, but for the fact of Hilda, who continued to stand next to Lolita, her hip still up against the kitchen counter, just staring at me and my Materva.

  When Gina’s mother—a wonderful woman, a teacher at a local elementary school—came for the dinner party, she brought a couple of friends with her, all Puerto Rican, but none as seriously into the independence movement as her daughter and her friends, so we got a reprieve from the politics of revolution for a little while at the table. We all praised the stew, which melted on our spoons, and made grunting noises over the bread and the flan we had selected for dessert. Gina sat next to me for the meal and though she didn’t say a word about what had happened in the kitchen, she reached under the table and squeezed my thigh, which helped me swallow.

  But as soon as Gina’s mother left—sometime after the coffee and before the beers—somehow Gina and her friends began reminiscing about their trips to Cuba, about helping on sugarcane cutting brigades, and hearing Fidel speak at the Plaza of the Revolution for hours on end while they ate ice cream and leaned on each other. They found it all inspirational, a blueprint for what they envisioned for Puerto Rico.

  Gina talked about Cuba’s colors and how, even being from Puerto Rico, its sister island, she was surprised by how verdant Cuba was, how insistent its landscape.

  “You know that line in the Garcia Lorca poem—te quiero verde?” Gina asked. “It always sounded so stupid to me until I went to Cuba. It’s such a lush place.” Then she put her arm around me, kissed my cheek and told me I came from a very beautiful country.

  “Have you read Amparo Maure’s poems about Cuba?” asked Ana, trying to be helpful again. “She went there in the sixties, at the very beginning of the revolution, and back again after Mariel, and she wrote some beautiful things about the island, and the Cuban people.”

  Then Ana recited a few lines from memory, which were quite moving indeed. But Hilda was not into poetry or into describing the view. In fact, she wasn’t really into talking with her friends, but into lecturing me. At her first opportunity, she started telling me about the importance of the Cuban revolution (as if I, a Cuban, didn’t know), and what it meant to Puerto Rican independence, and how throwing off yanqui imperialism was the right thing to do. She said that as much as she hates the nationalism of Cuban exiles, she understands that its island counterpart is what has kept the revolution alive, and why Fidel is so strong.

  “Say what you will,” she said, “Fidel has tremendos cojones.”

  I chuckled at that. I mean, everybody—even the people who most despise Fidel—agree he’s one ballsy character. How else could he have lasted decade after decade? How else could he inspire the kind of intense emotions Cubans have for him? After all, it’s not just hate the exiles feel for him, but admiration too. His sheer audacity raises the level and scope of their fury. They see in his outrageousness some measure of their own capacity, of their own ability to survive—him on his island, and they—us, because my family’s part of it too—here, in the U.S.

  “What’s so funny?” Hilda asked me.

  “Nothing, really,” I said.

  “Well, something, you were laughing,” she said. “You weren’t laughing at me, were you?”

  I shook my head. “God no,” I said, exasperated now. “Look, I was laughing at the idea of Fidel and his tremendos cojones— like that’s a news flash, okay? I mean, I can be amused sometimes, can’t I?”

  “You have no respect,” Hilda said, getting up with a flourish and standing dramatically by a poster of Frida Kahlo.

  “Hey, you’re the one who said it,” I said. I looked around desperately for help, but no one was making a move in my direction. Gina was leaning back on the couch next to me, staring straight ahead, at nothing, her lips pursed and her eyes hooded.

  “It’s different coming from me,” Hilda said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m no gusana, okay?”

  “Neither am I,” I said.

  Gina sat up. Everyone’s attention shifted to her. She covered her face with her hands.

  “You need to explain context to your girlfriend,” Hilda sneered at her.

  “Hilda, shut up,” Gina finally said, removing her hands from her face. “I mean, enough…por dios.”

  “It’s late,” Ana said, ever the diplomat. She pulled her jacket from behind a chair and started to work her arms into the sleeves. “I’m going home.” Gina nodded without looking up. “Hilda, c’mon, I’ll give you a ride.”

  But Hilda was incredulous. “That’s it?” she said. “We’re just gonna let it go at that?”

  Gina groaned something that sounded like “Aaaaaaar-rrrrggggghhhh,” grit her teeth and threw herself back on the couch. “For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s fuckin’ sake!” she screamed, stomping the floor, her body twisting in frustration as if she were having a seizure.

  Ana ushered Hilda and the others out. I heard the door open and shut, the clatter of so many feet and angry voices down the stairs and then the sound of the downstairs door creaking closed. Gina and I just sat there. On the surface it seemed she’d taken my side, but I knew better. The gulf between us was wider than the ninety miles from Havana to Miami and the air was just as thick with doubt and suspicion.

  What was going on here? I looked over at Gina and she was a stranger, her head back on the couch, her jaw tight. I wanted to believe that she was hurt and torn by what had happened—that she was angry at Hilda for insulting me, her lover, but I was afraid Gina might somehow think what had just happened was okay.

  And I thought again about Jimmy, about his stupid Puerto Rican jokes, and Pucho laughing, and Nena looking away, and Mami and Papi raising their eyebrows because they thought the joke was funny but knew Gina didn’t.

  “So Pm a baaaaaaaad Cuban?” I asked, trying to keep it light.

  Gina shrugged. “It’s a bad joke,” she admitted. “It’s what a lot of people call Cuban exiles.”

  “Do you agree with Hilda?” I asked. “Do you really think I’m a gusana?”

  Gina smiled a little, her eyes still closed. “You? You, personally?” she asked. She combed her hair back with her fingers. She was still splayed on the couch, eyes closed. “I don’t know, Juani, I really don’t.”

  “What I mean is, do you really think it’s so despicable that we’re here?” I asked. My lip was trembling. “We wouldn’t know each other, we wouldn’t be together, if my parents hadn’t left Cuba.” I was choking a little, holding back tears.

  Gina sat up and put her arms around me. “Migusanita,” she said softly, stroking me. Then she said she understood that the word meant different things to me than to her—that, obviously, I found it pejorative, while she thought it was a vernacular description for exiles, which is what we were. “It never occurred to me that you felt so strongly about it,” she said.

  “But that’s not what I asked,” I said, feeling toyed wit
h. “I asked if you really thought my parents’ being here was so bad.”

  Gina sighed. “I wouldn’t have left.” She paused. “How about you—if you’d been old enough to decide for yourself—would you have left?”

  The truth is, I’d never thought about it before. I stared at her, dumbfounded. Who would I have been in Cuba? Who could I still be, in Cuba or here? “I…I don’t know,” I finally muttered.

  “Do you remember anything about your life in Cuba?” she asked.

  And images of wooden doors, big and brown and old—like casdes doors—came to mind. And smoke billowing from a boxing ring in black and white on my parents’ TV, all the neighbors gathered round watching in our house in Havana. And blue uniformed policemen, their pants too tight around the crotch and hips. Hot, hazy days. Hiding in the shadows of thick-leafed trees. Salt spraying off the malecón. Big American cars with wings and my father’s boxy Lada falling apart, its glass smudged by berries from the overhanging branches crowding the windows anywhere he parked it.

  And I realized that I’d left Cuba too young to remember anything but snatches of color and scattered words, like the cutout letters in a ransom note. And what little I could put together had since been forged and painted over by the fervor, malice and nostalgia of others. What did I really know? And who did I believe? Who could I believe?

  I looked up and there was Fidel on Gina’s wall, smiling and smoking and chinning himself.

  And I realized, sitting there on Gina’s couch, that, among all the dizzying feelings bloating my brain, I was jealous that she and her friends knew so much about my country, and I knew so little, really, not just about Cuba, but about Puerto Rico and everywhere else. I was pissed that, while they’d been to Cuba, I had spent all my time working in a laundromat folding other people’s clothes and emptying quarters from the pinball machines in the back. I hated their independence movement, not for political reasons, but because it seemed to give them direction. And hope. Suddenly, I hated that I was just sitting there like a big black hole, like the mouth of one of those big industrial washers into which everybody just throws all their dirty clothes.