by Amanda Hale
‘But the food,’ he said, hurrying to her side. ‘Mi amor, tenemos a comer.’
There was a pig roasting on a spit out back, and las tres cocineras were preparing rice and plátanos with malanga and huge platters of tomato and cucumber salad. Karina shrugged. Of course they couldn’t leave without eating. Onaldo had been looking forward to the meal all day. Her attention was drawn to a woman standing in the doorway with a little girl hanging onto her and another hiding behind her skirt. She was a young woman with a kind of beauty that had been knocked askew, the main problem being that she had lost most of her teeth, although her lips were still full and sensual. She had a wounded though defiant look. Karina gestured to the seat beside her and the woman entered the house and moved forward eagerly to sit. Karina offered her own plastic cup of rum and the girl took it without hesitation. Her sip was a polite one — she didn’t drain the cup — and she smiled with closed mouth as she handed it back. A low rumble of discontent travelled around the room as the two women began to converse. Though Onaldo sat contentedly at Karina’s side, the other men in the room were clearly disapproving.
‘Me llamo Hortensia,’ she said. ‘I live down the street with my mother and my daughters — they’re twins.’ The children still hovered in the doorway, too shy to enter but, after much encouragement from both Hortensia and Karina one of the girls launched herself at her mother and clung like a barnacle to her knee, while her twin continued to flirt from the doorway. Karina offered her cup once again and told Hortensia to keep it. She had a beautiful smile and dark green eyes with a quality of light like that reflecting off a sun-dappled pool. She spoke urgently of a broken marriage, another child who had chosen to stay with the father — ‘He doesn’t love me,’ she said, almost whining.
‘Your husband?’
‘No, my son,’ Hortensia insisted, as though the father were inconsequential. Karina wondered if the twins had a different father, as was the case in so many Cuban families, with multiple mothers and fathers and half-siblings.
‘¿Qué le pasó a tus dientes?’ Karina asked. It was impossible to ignore Hortensia’s darkened mouth, filled with an emptiness that should come only to the elderly, though she did have a few molars in back, just enough to chew on. Without hesitation Hortensia launched into a story about her childhood in Matanzas where she had grown up sucking on sugar cane. ‘It rotted my teeth,’ she said, and pulled back the loose skin of her mouth to reveal a raw and ruddy darkness. ‘Ah,’ Karina nodded thoughtfully. It didn’t sound quite right, but she decided not to pursue the matter further, then she couldn’t help herself. ‘Couldn’t you get them fixed? It’s free in Cuba, no? The dentist could make you some false teeth. Eres joven.’ she insisted. ‘Es una cuestión de salud.’ She noticed Hortensia glancing across the room, her eyes shifty and evasive, then Karina became aware of a man leaning against the far wall watching them. He was a serious looking guy with a heavy dark mustache — one of Rafael’s friends to whom Karina had been introduced when she’d arrived, but the rum was getting to her. She couldn’t remember his name.
Hortensia began talking too loudly, almost defiantly, as though she were showing off, but for whom? Was that her husband? Hortensia showed a strange mixture of defiance and cowardice in a kind of staccato rhythm, then suddenly the man lunged towards them and grabbed Hortensia’s wrist. An involuntary whimper escaped her mouth as she pulled back cowering against Karina.
‘¿Qué quieres?’ Karina demanded, staring the man down, but he ignored her and continued pulling on Hortensia’s arm as he spoke rapidly to her in a low hiss so that Karina couldn’t quite catch what he was saying. Hortensia held her ground and refused to budge from the safety of the Canadian’s side until Rafael came forward with a couple more of the men, menacing in their single-mindedness as they pulled Hortensia to her feet and, despite Karina’s loud protest, dragged her towards the door. Onaldo, reluctant to involve himself in the altercation, began to caution Karina, but she was already on her feet babbling a torrent of adrenalin-driven words and phrases — ungrammatical, she realized as she heard the fractured Spanish coming out of her mouth, but she couldn’t stop once she’d started. It was Rafael she addressed, demanding to know why they were harassing Hortensia. ‘¿Porqué tu . . . tu permites a . . . a . . . a ellos acostar esta mujer?’ The men all sniggered, even Onaldo, some of them laughing out loud, and she realized she’d once more confused acosar with acostar, asking Rafael why they were putting Hortensia to bed instead of why they were accosting her. She and Onaldo would normally have a good laugh over her mistakes, but this time her stupid error only made her angrier. She knew that as a foreigner she didn’t count. As far as they were concerned Hortensia was the only female at the fiesta apart from the three cooks who were safely in the kitchen where they belonged. With her gappy mouth and clingy children, her pleading eyes and her thirst for rum, Hortensia was destroying the myth.
‘¿Por qué ese hombre la empuja alrededor?’ she asked carefully. Why is he pushing her around?
‘He’s her brother. He has the right,’ Rafael replied, thrusting out his chest.
The furious response on Karina’s face threw Rafael into a panic. ‘She’s not welcome here! She must leave!’ he barked, and now she could see how he had protected Onaldo. He was a scrapper. But he wasn’t prepared to protect a woman against a bully.
‘If she leaves I leave,’ Karina said, pointing at the open doorway. ‘You’re brutes, all of you!’ She registered the sudden concern on Rafael’s face at the same moment that she felt Onaldo’s hand on her shoulder, but she was already in motion, out the door and onto the street, on the edge of the scrum in which Hortensia, her brother and a couple more of the men were locked.
‘She’s your sister!’ she shouted. ‘Why are you treating her like this? ‘¡Es una . . . una vergüenza! Ella es . . . es . . . es . . . tu familia!’ Family — the magic word for Cubans, for what else did they have? She wanted to say so much more about the disgrace of it, the shame, but she was spluttering now and couldn’t find the words. Besides which, Karina could see beneath the brother’s mustache the thin twisted line of his lips, as though he might be winding up to hit someone. Not me, she thought, even as a snake of fear slithered through her. To hit a tourist would be a crime. He’d be sent to prison. The tourist, like the customer, is always right, because Cuba lives off tourism. She swung around as Onaldo took her arm and shook him off. Rafael stood in the doorway, trying to herd them back into the house, but Karina refused to move. She faced the brother full on and stared into his mean eyes, with so many thoughts racing through her head. She knew she was safe but what about Hortensia? Was she making more trouble for her? Was she acting like one of those ignorant foreigners who interfere in other people’s business, who think they know better and try to impose their own values on another culture? Was she making herself complicit in all that oppressive colonial history? ‘Por favor,’ she said with mock politeness, placing the flat of her hand on the brother’s chest, keeping him at bay as she edged away slowly, taking hold of Hortensia with her other hand. In that same moment Hortensia shook herself free of the brother and latched onto Karina, her children still hanging onto her, round-eyed, with their sticky little mouths gaping open.
‘Vamos,’ Karina said, ‘Ven adentro,’ and she reached for the hand of one of the twins. Hortensia had hold of the other child, and they moved as one body — hesitant and yet with a hint of pride on the face of the beaten mother as she settled herself next to Karina, smirking at her brother who glared still from the open doorway. It was he who stood on the outside now. How many punches to the mouth had she taken?
Soon the aroma of roast pig and steaming vegetables claimed everyone’s attention, and Karina led Hortensia and the children to the kitchen where the cook, still holding her baby, gave Hortensia a plate piled high with food for her and the kids. They sat on a rickety wooden bench and ate ravenously. When they were done Hortensia grasped Karina’s hands and kissed her on both cheeks, then she left with her little girls, th
eir bellies tight like drums as they chanted in unison, ‘Barriga llena, corazón contento’ — Full belly, happy heart.
Onaldo patted his belly and burped, satisfied at last by the meal he had come for. Already another giant pop bottle of street rum had appeared. Onaldo and Rafaelito would not discuss what had happened at the birthday fiesta. The matter would dissolve into the haze of the afternoon. Nor would the other men discuss it. Silence was best. In the end it had been a good meal with a few shots of rum to blur the edges of their difficult lives.
LA ULTIMA PAELLA
for Roger Tro
Hipólito Hernando Aragón del Portillo was born a pale grub of an infant and grew into a dreamy child and a romancer. His head was filled with stories collaged from baby books, and he began to tell them as soon as he could speak. ‘Mami! I saw a tiger on the beach chasing an elephant. And then . . . then . . . mira . . . a pirate came and chopped off its head with his espada!’
‘Mentira, Popo!’ his mother would exclaim, whomping his tiny bottom.
‘No no no, Mami,’ he said, shaking his little head. ‘El pirata came in a big boat, and . . . and . . . and it had cannons with bocas de fuego, they went bang bang! I had to cover my ears, Mami.’
‘Lies, lies, you always tell me lies, Popo!’ She wagged a cautionary finger at him. But the child was confused because he was only trying to share with his mother the dreams that illuminated his mind. Far from retreating into silence Hipólito insisted on his stories and invented elaborate structures to support them, and stubbornly repeated them day after day until his soft-hearted mother gave in. ‘Ah, Popo,’ she sighed, pressing his pale face to her bosom, ‘My muchacho lives in his own world.’
His schoolmates were less indulgent, which made schooldays a torture until his retreat into the world of books. He learned to arrange his book-fed fantasies into credible scenarios, and won a scholarship to the university in Guantánamo and a second award for post-graduate studies in La Habana where he lodged in the house of Doña Lucía, who was an excellent cook, and where Hipólito tasted for the first time in his life haute cuisine. Every afternoon he would sit at the table with Doña Lucía and her pale daughter as he tucked into ropa vieja with creamy potatoes, camarones con ajo y arroz blanco, pescado Santa Barbara, pollo frito y congrí . . . Who knew where Doña Lucía managed to find the ingredients for these exotic dishes, and the delicate saffron to colour her rice? Indeed, when Hipólito told his fellow students of his gastronomical evenings they laughed at him. ‘Ojalá!’ they guffawed. ‘Don’t you just wish, Aragón!’ And they slapped him jovially on his broadening back. Everyone in La Habana called him by his surname, Aragón, so that was the name he adopted. It removed him from the memories of an awkward childhood and helped him to expand into a new persona. With the growth of his reputation as an historian a circle of influential academic colleagues began to surround Hipólito, just as his girth expanded to mirror his success (with the help of Doña Lucía’s delicious meals), so that by the time he returned to live in Baracoa with his new wife, Yusmila, a fellow but lesser historian he had encountered in the stacks of the university library one feverish afternoon, Aragón was firmly and fleshily established with a new identity as a man of literal and metaphorical substance. It was as though a new person had come to town. No-one remembered Hipólito. He was Aragón now, lauded and respected as a Havana intellectual. He arrived home with three crates of books which he transferred one by one to the shelves of his new office at the Museo Matachín. His was the Office of the Historiador de Baracoa, because he was of course a Baracoan, even though absent for the past six years, and had returned triumphant with an accomplished though deferential wife who was already pregnant with a child who promised to be a son.
The Museum was housed in an old Spanish fort and was run by Osiris Rivero, a gentle archaeologist/anthropologist who housed there his discoveries from the wealth of Taíno remains surrounding the town. There were display cases filled with skeletons and pottery shards, stones inscribed with Taíno symbols, caracoles, polymitas, and many mysterious objects, the origins of which could only be speculated on. Sunk into the thick grass surrounding the museum were ancient canons pointing out above the sturdy stone wall, ready to defend the fortress from attack. But Rivero had not anticipated the kind of attack which was to strike at the heart of his museum.
Aragón sat silently plotting after dinner with his pregnant Yusmila, his own stomach as full and round as hers. His imagination worked on through the night, filling his dreams with an elaborate narrative, so that when he awoke sweating under the mosquito net he was tousled and flushed. After a shower and a breakfast of crusty bread with a ham and cheese tortilla and three cups of strong sweet café con leche, Aragón marched downtown in a crisp white shirt and his elegant sombrero to the offices of Adriano Barzaga, the Mayor of Baracoa, a man with whom he had already curried considerable favor by inviting him to his house for pescado Santa Barbara. It had been a jovial evening with many cups of Spanish wine and Havana Club consumed while Yusmila served the men, and Aragón carefully planted during the course of the evening a trench of false rumours about Rivero. With all the power of conviction that had enabled him to create his new persona, he managed to persuade Barzaga that Rivero should be removed along with his Taíno treasures, and relocated up the hill in Paraíso, where he could more readily display his bones in a cave. ‘Quaint, no?’ quipped Aragón. ‘And Museo Matachín can be filled with colonial treasures — Spanish paintings, furniture and fabrics from the time of Diego Velasquez, the Governor of New Spain who made Baracoa his first seat of government and employed Hernando Cortés as Mayor,’ he said with a flourish of his small soft hands. He leaned towards Barzaga and continued in an intimate tone, ‘This is what our visitors want to see, not a collection of crumbling bones and polymita shells.’
The Mayor was convinced and Osiris Rivero, who at first refused the suggestion made to him, was ordered to decamp to El Paraíso where he did indeed set up a more genuine and site-specific museum, though unfortunately out of the way. Tourists from cooler climes were loath to climb the steep hill to the Paraíso caves in the steamy heat of a Baracoa day, nor did they favor the climb on rainy days when the hill became a stream of mud.
Aragón ensconced himself in his new office, surrounded by his books, and by a staff which included a tall and eccentric English speaker, the only one in town. Alben was to translate for Aragón during the evening presentations for tourists, held on the spongy green grass outside — which turned an eerie blue in the moonlight — amidst the sunken canons. Aragón was determinedly unilingual and, in any case, had a soft persuasive voice, while Alben’s voice boomed above the sound of crashing waves on the nearby shore. El Museo Matachín was situated at the far end of the Malecón where the road curved past Playa Caribe, and doglegged left onto the road to Cabacú. In the park across from the museum stood an extraordinarily ugly statue of Cristóbal Colón, ironically placed in the firing line of the canons.
Yusmila did indeed give birth to a son and during her extended maternity leave Aragón — or, mi pequeño Hipo, as she called her husband, teasing him about his large spare tire — encouraged her to further expand her culinary horizons. ‘I will try, mi amor,’ she said, ‘But Hipito, there is a limit to what one can make with rice, beans, and the occasional chicken leg. You know how difficult it is to find anything worth eating in Baracoa!’
Aragón was particularly fond of the food propaganda slides that were projected onto the wall of the Habanera Hotel on a Saturday night. He would take his evening stroll and linger there in front of the Hotel, munching on a cone of peanuts purchased from el manisero, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Yoel and Yurubí, ordinary working men. It was in one such moment, tipping the last peanut into his mouth, that he had a brilliant idea. He would travel into the countryside with Galina, the director of the Biblioteca, and a woman with remarkable knowledge of the local cuisine practised by the campesinos. He would invite Ricardo along with his little box camera, and t
ogether they would gather material — colour photographs, recipes, personal testimonies of las cocineras tradicionales— and he, Aragón, would publish it as a testament to his gastronomical passion and historical expertise, yes!
This was the first book and, though it was in fact a collage of everyone else’s text and imagery, Aragón was credited with authorship because he had pulled it together; he was the Historiador, un personaje, a man about town and a magnet for the ambitious. Ordinary Cubans could not afford to buy his book so Aragón donated a copy to the Biblioteca where local people were free to go and salivate over the glossy photos of their very own traditional dishes before going home to the daily plate of rice and beans. Aragón bestowed upon Galina and Ricardo a copy each; he sent one to the Archbishop’s residence in Guantánamo; and several copies to more influential acquaintances from his university days in La Habana. He displayed a copy in the lobby of the museum where it soon became grubby and dog-eared from tourists thumbing through it. The rest he hoarded in boxes in his office, with a copy strategically placed on his desk for all to see as they entered. His energetic sales pitch was for the most part lost on the Canadian, Italian, German, Japanese, Scandinavian and other assorted tourists who might have conversed with him in English had he mastered it. But one day a group of Spanish delegates arrived at the museum. They were important people from Madrid, on a cultural tour of Cuba, and had been referred to Aragón by their contacts at the university in La Habana. They loved the book, they loved the museum, they were charmed by Aragón and invited him to Spain on his own cultural tour. They carried back to Madrid half a dozen copies of his book — “La Comida Típica de Baracoa, Cuba,” and they urged him to bring a couple of boxes when he embarked on his first trip to Spain.
Aragón had never before flown in an airplane, but as he was transported into the clouds with the powerful force of jet engines vibrating his nether regions, he felt strangely secure because it was, he realized, a familiar feeling. In his early flights of fancy he had accustomed himself to a sense of unfettered freedom and a belief in miracles, so he had no fear as he leaned back in his seat with a tattered grey belt straining at his belly and awaited his first beverage, which came with clinking ice cubes in a plastic glass complete with transparent twirler. His appetite was whetted by the cocktail, and when the meal arrived on a tiny tray which the hostess perched on the tiny table in front of him, Aragón tucked in with delight to each of the plastic containers with their salads, meats, potatoes and puddings, and licked them clean. If Aragón thought this was living he was in for a big surprise.