AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  Girls waiting at a local bar.

  The “girls” were jinteras, hustlers. Men are jinterns. All Cubans who sell themselves, or their services, from taxi rides to cigars, get the label. I love the harshness of its first syllable and how that edge glides into a promise in the second. But I hate that it takes only that one word to dismiss a person.

  That afternoon, I occasionally used my pathetically broken Spanish to attempt to translate our conversation to “the girl.” Perhaps because it made up for being too relaxed, too on holiday, to care about her name. She didn’t pay attention to what Maurice was talking about. Most of the time she lounged back in her chair, gazed at the ocean and picked at a plate of fried chicken. Maurice had bought her a plate of it with fries for about four dollars, and in exchange for this, a couple of beers and the vague possibility that he might hand more money her way, she was willing to while away the afternoon.

  Wind and salt had eaten the pinks and oranges off the buildings.

  She told me she was a computer student at the university. There was no money in it. Like all the tourist books said, a professional would make less than fifteen dollars a month.

  “But later, muy tarde, es bueno por muy tarde,” I said. If you have a computer degree you can travel, you can go to America, I said. At least for a while, send money home, I said. I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that she wouldn’t have to spend her life selling compliments for a four-dollar plate of chicken. She told me she didn’t want to leave Cuba. Only for a holiday maybe. Then she looked away from me.

  I didn’t say what else I was thinking, which was that if she spent that afternoon and many others like it studying maybe she could get a grant to at least study abroad. In a way, I was glad she was barely tolerating my advice. I could hear her thinking, “This woman thinks she’s going to save me from all this, like every other American woman I’ve ever met. What do they know about life here? Fuck her.” So after she brushed me off, we sat side by side in companionable, sullen, “fuck-you” silence, and I talked to Maurice.

  After a few hours, the girl started whispering to Paul urgently in fluent English.

  “She’s saying that if I want pot, I just have to walk into the building. They’re selling it upstairs,” he whispered to me. From what she said, it was too expensive.

  The sun was going down. A small bus pulled up and unloaded a group of tourists. They filled the empty chairs, talked loudly in German and sucked back cheap mojitos. At another table a couple chewed on the burnt skin of their chicken.

  “Is the chicken good? Te gusta? Do you want bread?” Maurice kept asking the girl. “Yes, yes, no bread, okay? Everything’s fine,” she’d say to him, giving him only as much attention as he’d bought, and she’d go back to watching the sea.

  Another day we meet a jintero. We come out of our casa, a nice room with big shuttered windows and hot water in a house belonging to a lovely Cuban lady. We would like to go to the beach east of town.

  Outside, several men are leaning against the fence. They are there every day. “Taxi? Taxi?” they ask every time we pass by. This time I say, “Si, taxi por Playas del Este?”

  An older man steps away. “Si,” he says. “Por Playas?”

  I repeat, “Si, okay,” and he gets ready to walk to where I imagine his car is parked.

  “Cuanto?” I say, because though to them we are rich Yankees, back home we have no money.

  “Ten dollars,” he says.

  “Ten dollars? Todo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  Again, we barely catch his name. I don’t know if the problem is the thick Cuban accent that layers their Spanish with sounds I’ve never heard before, but we’re terrible at this. So we refer to him as Joe, the name I use for my landlord—a good stand-in for any older man who’s on the short side and keeps his thoughts to himself. This Joe used to work as a United Nations economics expert on Africa. Now he’s retired and drives a taxi. He laughs after he tells me this. I want to apologize, but instead I laugh, because in that moment of laughter, we’re together in an absurd world. A UN rep driving two Canadians to the beach.

  A moment later, though, I see more of his world. He drives through a ramshackle neighbourhood that reminds me of villages I saw in Romania when I was a child while holidaying with my parents in the Carpathians. Kids in ripped T-shirts emblazoned with 7 UP or Coke logos mill around. The windows of houses are missing panes. To someone who’s never seen this kind of life before, it looks bad, like the background to a World Relief ad. Life goes on, though. Chickens peck at the side of the road. A woman is standing on her balcony, breast-feeding a baby. Poverty means life is led in public. These streets are a kind of democracy.

  If I’d been born in the West, perhaps my love of the beach would have been tainted by the scenes I’ve just witnessed. Instead, because that suburb of Havana reminds me so much of being a child, I feel at home swimming in the bluest and warmest waters I’ve ever seen.

  “Mais por qué? Pagamos con dollares,” I say.

  I’m arguing with the guard at one of the entrances to the Coppelia ice cream park, the 1960s-designed fantasy in tribute to helado. They only offer two flavours, strawberry and chocolate, a fact memorialized in the movie of the same name.

  “Allí, allí,” the guard says and points us to a small enclosure just inside the gate.

  Coppelia is one of the only places where Habaneros can still pay in pesos. Foreigners are penned into the other park the guard is directing us to. The lineup to get into the one place in Havana where there are no tourists to make the Habaneros feel poor can stretch for blocks. Paul tries another approach. He strolls brazenly past a guard with his back turned. I follow.

  We’re in! We got into the ice cream park! I feel like Bonnie, but contain my guilty excitement lest I tip off the cops.

  “Tienes fresa, por favor?” I ask once we’re sitting down at a little metal table, surrounded by families eating bowls of ice cream.

  “No, chocolate,” the waiter replies.

  “Okay. Dos chocolates.”

  I give the waiter a twenty-peso bill and he looks at me impatiently and tells me again how much it is. I press another twenty-peso bill into his hand and he hands it back and takes off. I don’t understand numbers in Spanish. He comes back with a ridiculous amount of change and we figure out that the ice cream is sold in centavos, so we paid about fourteen cents.

  Afterwards, emboldened, we stand on the street corner and wait for a peso taxi-cab to pick us up. They’re all old 1950s cars and only stop for locals. None of them stop for us tourists. We’d upset the economics of the peso cabs. Or try and talk Spanish to them, or take too long to understand.

  And yet I continue to feel that somehow I fit in here because I grew up in a Second World Communist country just like theirs. Of course I’m a Westerner now. If I wanted to, I could live three months out of the year here quite comfortably with my dollars. I wish I were truly rich and could afford to go to places where I wouldn’t be benefiting from people’s poverty. I wish that the Cubans wanted us here only to be hospitable, to show us their beautiful country, not because they need our money. I say that I wish, I wish, all these benevolent wishes, but I find myself so annoyed by the constant requests for “Tienes dollar, dollar?” that I decide I’m going to answer, “No, tengo tenedor.” I have a fork. An insult made harsher by its absurdity. A friend says that when you’re in India for the first time, you are shocked by the beggars lining the streets. Soon enough, you learn to slap them away.

  Finally we hail a dollar taxi—a newer Russian-made Lada. We’re going to a baseball game at el Estadio Latinoamericano. Two pesos for a ticket. Wooden benches line the stadium. The audience is made up mostly of kids and young men. We sit behind a boy and girl about nine years old. The girl looks at the boy every once in a while and strokes his short brown hair. He looks straight ahead and eats peanuts out of a skinny paper cone.

  I’m very happy. The stadium reminds me of the plea
sures of my childhood, when going to see the circus and buying an ice cream during intermission was happiness. What else do people need but some peanuts, a lovely evening and a baseball game to be content? But paradoxically, all the exhortations of the West to live simply, to stop and enjoy the moment, ring hollow right now. Cubans have no choice but to extract happiness out of few possibilities.

  An old man walks around with a blue Thermos. I run after him and ask for whatever it is he’s got, handing him a couple of pesos. He gives me back a whack of centavos and, as I try to put them in my pocket, I drop the small paper cup he’s made out of some sheets of school paper, and spill the homemade espresso he poured. He gives me another one for free and shakes his head at my ineptitude. And finally, frowned upon by this man, I can put all my judgments and liberal superiority and emotional largesse back into my suitcase to take right back home, because at least this one Cuban has no need of me.

  Simona Chiose is the author of Good Girls Do: Sex Chronicles of a Shameless Generation. She has written on culture, arts, travel and society and has worked as a television producer. She is working on a novel about globalization.

  Rosa and Bob.

  004Destination: U.S.A.

  TWO DAYS IN DALLAS

  Charles Wilkins

  When bedtime came at perhaps two in the morning, Bob informed me unselfconsciously that I would be sleeping “in the truck.” He led me to a grove of cottonwoods where he kept the mouldering eighteen-wheeler in which, twice a week, he drove eight hundred miles round-trip between Dallas and Galveston to fetch bananas for a local transport firm. At the moment, there were forty-thousand pounds of Chiquitas in the trailer, awaiting delivery to the distribution terminal of a Texas supermarket chain. The trailer’s refrigeration compressor was thrumming at a volume that obliterated conversation within twenty feet of the vehicle.

  “You can go right up there in the back of the cab,” Bob shouted. “It’s comfy as hell!”

  The prophetic words were barely out of his mouth when a deathly sounding wail erupted from the nearby scrub. “That’s just Cleo!” Bob hollered. “Rosa cut back her horse meat cause she ain’t doin nuthin!”

  Cleo, I quickly learned, was a four-hundred-pound Bengal tiger that, in Bob’s words, “had had a cuppa coffee with the circus” but had been shipped back to Texas a month ago because “she had taken half the arm off her groom and was simply too vicious for the act.” Cleo had “busted out” twice during the past couple of weeks, but Bob’s wife, Rosa, a retired Mexican circus performer, had, both times, gotten her safely back in before she “killed anybody or ate up the dogs.” Bob had fixed her cage, he reassured me, and, as we approached it, I could see, sure enough, that its hinges and locks were reinforced with what appeared to be an old coat hanger and a few bent screw nails.

  At the truck, I protested that I wouldn’t be able to sleep with the din from the compressor, and Bob shouted that I wouldn’t even hear it above the truck’s engine, which he would turn on in order to run the air conditioner in the cab. “Without it you’ll suffocate!” he shouted. “And ya can’t have them windows down, or the skeeters’ll chaw ya to ratshit!”

  All of which is how on a pestilently hot night in mid-August 2001, on a plot of backwater scrub, by a south-Dallas alligator preserve (and within sniffing distance of a famished tiger), I found myself staring forlornly from the window of a twenty-five-year-old Freightliner and eventually drifting into dreamland.

  I had arrived in Dallas eight hours earlier, having been summoned to the city by an up-market law firm to give a deposition in a civil suit against a broke and dissolute circus owner whose elephant had killed a young animal groom in Timmins, Ontario, a year earlier.

  Not that I know a thing about elephants. But in 1998 I had written about the killer in question in a book about my travels with the Wallenda Circus and was considered marginally less ignorant on the subject than any average cowpoke who might have been hauled in off the street.

  I hasten to add that one of the enduring legacies of my time with the circus is my friendship with Bob Gibbs, a 370-pound animal trainer and banana-truck driver who had handled the elephants on the aforementioned travels and who had taken me on as a kind of educational project. Bob had been pestering me for months to visit him, and when the call came to give testimony in what the Dallas press had labelled “the elephant murder,” I took it as an opportunity for a social call.

  Bob met me at the airport, and when I had collected my luggage, he suggested we drive immediately to a south-Dallas taqueria where we could tank up on enchiladas and, if we were in time, catch the Sunday evening floor show.

  Lead on, commander, and off we rattled in Bob’s rusty Ford Escort, in the company of Bob’s young friend Tony, a Mexican fruit picker who was in the United States illegally, living with nine other aliens in the squalid shack of a south-side used-car lot. Because Tony spoke no English, Bob felt free to tell me in his presence that he was “a bit thick” and that he had been brought into Texas by a Mexican “coyote” whom he was paying off at a rate of twenty dollars a week. One missed payment, Bob confided, meant broken kneecaps, a second “the bullet and the shallow grave.”

  CLEO HAD “BUSTED OUT” TWICE DURING THE PAST COUPLE OF WEEKS, BUT BOB’S WIFE, ROSA, A RETIRED MEXICAN CIRCUS PERFORMER, HAD, BOTH TIMES, GOTTEN HER SAFELY BACK IN BEFORE SHE “KILLED ANYBODY OR ATE UP THE DOGS.”

  None of which seemed to affect Tony in the least as he ogled the dancers and scarfed down tortillas crammed with finely chopped pig brains and cow stomach.

  When eventually we dropped Tony at the used-car lot, the choice for me was whether to return to the four-star hotel suite that had been rented for me by the law firm or go with Bob to where he lives with Rosa in a tiny trailer on forty dusty acres that are the winter quarters of the fast-fading Clyde Brothers Johnson Circus.

  Two roads diverged, as Frost wrote, and I took the one to the winter quarters, where a burned-out elephant barn rotted amidst dozens of derelict circus vehicles—garishly painted trucks, animal cages and house trailers—in an atmosphere that, at one in the morning, was as foreign, fetid and sinister as the hotel suite would have been familiar.

  A light flickered in the trailer window where Rosa slept, and as we approached the place, a team of Chihuahuas inside began throwing themselves at the screen door, the sooner to reach Bob and lick the sweaty expanses of his stomach.

  While I had expected to stay with Bob and Rosa, I realized on poking my head into the trailer that, with four Chihuahuas, six cats, several tons of circus memorabilia, and three or four weeks of unwashed dishes spread more or less uniformly across the floor, it wouldn’t, as they say, be a fit.

  “Whatever you do,” Bob told me as we relaxed on a pair of defunct car seats in the yard, “don’t say anything to Rosa.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “About the way we live,” he winced, gesturing with his head toward the trailer. “She’s very sensitive about it.”

  Rosa’s sensitivities had already been hammered that afternoon when one of her kittens had “exploded” during an electrical storm as it sat in a tree where it had gone to escape the alligators that occasionally wandered onto the property.

  Being a nature lover, Bob was pleased to point out that just a hundred feet away was the north boundary of an unfenced alligator preserve. The gators, fortunately, were little danger to human beings—at least compared to the water moccasins, which emerged regularly from the preserve.

  When I regained consciousness in the sleeping compartment of the truck and stuck my head out of the curtains, it was still dark, and we were roaring along a twelve-lane freeway on the way into Dallas. I retreated to my slab of sponge and emerged again only when we had entered the faux-Arctic caverns of Texas’s largest food-storage terminal. I climbed from the truck in shorts and a T-shirt, amid union lumpers wearing down jackets, snow boots and toques. The place was perhaps three times the size of the Toronto SkyDome, and was stacked forty feet high with crates of
cherries, mangoes and melons; lobster tails, T-bones and hams. We celebrated this abundance in the terminal’s windowless snack bunker with a breakfast of instant oatmeal (prepared runny so that it could be consumed without spoons or milk) and pink-iced shirt cardboard whimsically presented as Kellogg’s Raspberry Pop-Tarts.

  The plan was to spend the day sightseeing with Rosa. However, when we returned to the trailer, she had disappeared with the car. As a result, I spent the better part of the next six hours in a hammock, watching for snakes, dozing fitfully and working up a fiendish appetite in the 103-degree heat. Bob sat nearby, in front of a twenty-four-inch fan, all but naked—a kind of mini Mont Blanc—while Chihuahuas scrambled over his belly and chest. At one point, he shooed the dogs to the ground, fired a two-quart water bottle at the trailer and hollered, “WHERE THE HELL IS THAT WOMAN?”

  By the time Rosa appeared at about two p.m., his rage had dissipated, and he protested only mildly when she suggested that rather than beginning our tour right away we seek out an obscure Chicano butcher shop where she had been told she could buy ninety-nine-cent chickens that she intended to stew for the dogs.

  We found those chickens after a mere two-hour search, and at about dinner hour Bob and Rosa dropped me at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Stemmons Freeway, next to Parkland Hospital, where JFK died in 1963. As I climbed from the car, taking care to avoid the unwrapped fowl spread out at my feet under the air conditioning, Rosa called from the back seat that JFK was alive! She was sure of it, having read it in a Mexican tabloid.

  “He’s living in the Crowne Plaza!” piped Bob, to which Rosa responded that Bob should shut his rude trap, that the matter was between her and me.

  At 9:30 that evening, I had coffee in the hotel restaurant with the lawyers who would be grilling me in the morning. They wore golf shirts and Dockers and informed me that their intent in the case was to show that the “killer elephant” was predisposed to violence, in which case her owners could be proven liable in the victim’s death. To encourage my complicity, they showed me autopsy photos—horrible things, which would feature in my dreams for weeks to come, and which I told them I hoped would never be seen by the boy’s parents.