The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  “We will go for a walk,” he said.

  The door to the church lay open. In the entryway growled two dogs whom Tatico melted with a series of platitudes. I imagined my grandfather, more than half a century ago, overseeing construction between patients, in a crisp guayabera, a stethoscope around his neck. I found his taste austere but elegant. The pews were hardwood. The ceiling high enough to stand on a friend’s shoulders. The generous open windows invited the church’s most notable feature: the sound of the ocean, warming the rafters. A house for nothing but God and breaking waves.

  We took a shortcut through banana trees to the hospital. Tatico’s voice was soft, his words buzzing with friendship. He had dark skin and a shaved head and a leathery stoutness. He lamented the loss of the town’s gardens. I told him banana trees were plenty green, but to him, they were pests, evidence of laziness. Anyone with two thumbs could grow a banana tree. What worried him most were the snatches of plastic bags, bottles, and other refuse we passed along the way.

  “I wish you could have seen Nicaro when I was a boy,” he said. Tatico was the same age as my dad—68. I asked, but Tatico had moved here from another small town right after the revolution. He’d never met my family, but he was adamant that everyone had known their thumbprint.

  We reached the hospital. A small two-story structure, sky-blue accents, hives of small windowpanes. Water stains darkened the façade. How many tales had I heard of this place?

  Nearby, the site where my family’s house once stood. From every doorway I half expected a young couple and their children to emerge, the father bespectacled and egg-headed, the mother elegant and angular, their five kids teasing each other. How close my family felt in these moments, shadows on the other side of the thinnest scrim of time.

  Tatico explained that the row of homes off the midsection of the hospital had been torn down and rebuilt after the war. “They used to be very beautiful,” he said, as we passed seven houses that looked tacked together with spit.

  We reached a small overlook. A hill lined with royal palms stretched a long way down and down, until it reached the bay far below. This was the view I had seen in one of the few photographs my grandmother had managed to smuggle from the island, fronds silhouetted against glimmering ocean. Tatico pointed to the other side of the bay. “I get such nostalgia thinking of the way it used to look. Heartbreaking. Nostalgia will be our death.”

  I didn’t understand at first, but then I noticed his finger tracing a black strip of land between the blue water and the peninsula’s green grasses. A fire? No, explained Tatico—the nickel factory. They had dumped all the slag into the ocean, and now the water was 50 feet lower, the exposed land steeped in unused ore. He said they called it la tierra negra—the black earth. The shoreline was a decayed gum revealing the root of a rotten tooth.

  A handful of dirt roads led us down to sea level, where we found Las Palmas. It lay empty. The roof—whose thatch my dad had described in the most adoring of terms—was now rusted metal. A small ballroom with some chairs laid out. On the back patio stood an outdoor bar. The space felt forgotten; it was impossible to imagine music puncturing the quiet. Tatico greeted the bartender, who polished glasses for no one. The patio abutted shallow ocean. Calm swells lapped at a few ragged piers. Dad had told me he used to fish here, when it was still a dock. Tatico was at my elbow. I asked him why no one had rebuilt it.

  “There was an animated cartoon called The Rockeaters,” he said. “When they ran out of food and got hungry, instead of going out and finding a new way to eat, they would fill their bellies with rocks. That is the Cuban way. What use is it to fix the dock if it will only break again? Instead, we learn to enjoy sitting on the shore.”

  Tatico took me down to the old baseball field Dad used to play on. Four heifers munched the outfield. He told me that his mother was a big supporter of the revolution. After the war, Che—the Che Guevara—toured the entire country and stopped even in lowly Nicaro. His mother took a photo with Che, the two side by side. “Their arms like this,” Tatico said, placing his akimbo proudly. He said the photo was in the town museum, but she’d been cropped out. Only the triangle of her elbow remained.

  For dinner, Tatico made me cangrejo—crab. I remembered the word by associating it with Congress, imagining a legislative body of suited-and-tied crustaceans writing bills restricting travel. He served me an entire hubcap of rice. Canned peaches again for dessert. I asked Tatico if he ever got time to relax. He said he’d like to go to Cayo Saetía, an island 30 minutes away by car with one of the most beautiful beaches in all of Cuba. I asked why he couldn’t go if it was so close, and he said the entry fee was 10 CUC—half a month’s salary. Conversions again: imagine $1,200 to swim at Coney Island. The grand irony, that Cubans live in one of the world’s most beautiful countries, and they can’t afford to see it.

  Later, from the backyard patio, under the hand of a large avocado tree, he pointed across the water to the island—it was so close you could skip a rock there without it sinking.

  I spent the next day walking alone. I stopped by the natural pool—an area of shallow seawater hemmed in by stacked rubble—and wrote in my journal. I attempted notes for the novel, but it felt far away. More important were the days I’d spent speaking nothing but Spanish, thinking, even, in Spanish. The fire trees felt closer. Pinto the Magic Horse felt closer. More important than a stack of pages written in English a thousand miles away was the sense of becoming something new, and as I lay with my back against the sand I realized the moment I had feared before leaving had come to fruition, and I could name it: I was meeting my second self, my Cuban self. Across the water, another shadow of my father, shirtless in swim trunks, sharing a jug of guayaba juice with a friend. Behind them, spray-painted on the façade of a shack, the red capital A of anarchy. I moved to the water, which was filled with families and children, and lay on my back, allowing the water to hold me up. I imagined myself as my father, half a century ago, floating in this same water. I imagined this as home.

  Dad often tells the story of the last moment he saw Cuba. Imagine your country on the brink of revolution, led by a man who was “charismatic but strange.” Your neighbor grabbing a rifle and heading into the woods with a rucksack stuffed with resolve. A friend plucked from the night, the only possible explanation that he was a talker. Classmates being conscripted into the army, or being twice-baked in revolutionary fervor, hiking off into the mountains to meet El Comandante. My father was 10—too young for war in normal circumstances, but what is too young when philosophy is at stake?

  On the day the battle came to Nicaro, my family covered the windows with mattresses. Dad fled hand in hand with his siblings to the hospital. A helicopter hovered overhead, a machine gunner in the open flank of the aircraft’s belly, the broad hands of palm fronds pushing down under the rotors. My grandfather and the hospital’s men dressed the roof in an enormous fabric embroidered with a red cross to protect it from bombs. Inside, a man with his wife and daughter held a gun, saying if the Batistans came to take them, he would shoot first the daughter, then the wife, then himself.

  After the battle, my grandfather rode into the forest behind Nicaro on my aunt’s horse, Relámpago—Lightning—and tended the wounded rebel soldiers.

  Soon, my family was at a wharf in Havana, boarding the second-to-last ferry to leave the island before Castro’s chokehold. Nos ahogan. Tata pressing cash deep into a Vaseline jar. Sewing bills into a diaper. The bathroom so slick with seasickness—halfway up the walls, Dad says—that when the ship rocked, my father went skating. Nervous energies, halfway hewn hearts.

  We will return was my grandparents’ promise, not yet knowing it would be only me.

  And then Cuba was only eyeliner on the horizon.

  To hear Dad tell it, he knew he would not see Cuba again. He was 10 years old and vowed to himself that he would erase all memory of Cuba, and then he turned away.

  My third and last day in Nicaro, Xiomara announced that her phone calls ha
d yielded fruit; the next-door neighbor had known my grandparents when they were first dating. She had already arranged my meeting with her; in fact, I was already late.

  Her name was Nilsa. Tatico walked me over. He shouted her name from the front porch, she responded, and then he made a quick getaway. Weird, I thought. I sat on a metal chair. Across from me sat another outdoor chair whose fabric seat had long ago ripped, in its place a mountain of yellowed newspapers. Vines crept up the house and, it appeared, entered in through the open windows. Plantain trees in the yard, a coral honeysuckle.

  Nilsa emerged from the screen door, leaning on a walker, her left knee wrapped in an ACE bandage, her shoulders so stooped her neck ran parallel to the cement porch. But as soon as she sat in her chair, a regal formality entered her. Her shoulders unstooped. Her eyes cleared. I introduced myself. “You knew my grandparents when they were first dating,” I said.

  “Le voy a decir,” Nilsa said, using the formal pronoun, which gave the whole conversation an air of state business. I shall tell you.

  She had known my grandfather as the one who took over as assistant director of the hospital, the one who had the church built—facts I already knew. She said my grandparents seemed very much in love. Soon, though, her knowledge of the Loredos dried up, which was a disappointment. Instead, I asked about Nicaro, about her family. Nilsa’s husband worked as a factory hand for the nickel plant but died after 14 years of marriage. “We gave each other respect,” she said. “He did not drink. He did not smoke. Never a bad word, an evil touch. Are you married? Are you Catholic?”

  It was, perhaps, the hundred-and-first time I’d been asked of my marital status—by Nilsa, Tatico, and Xiomara; by Ileana and Melo; but also by the coat check worker at the national museum (who later propositioned me) and a random guy who’d asked me for the time. Cubans love being their own personal census bureau.

  “I have a girlfriend.”

  “Do you live together?”

  When I hesitated, she raised a hand. “I do not judge. Judging others is not generous. To be generous is to be happy; to be ungenerous is to be unhappy.”

  “Okay, we do,” I said. “In sin!”

  Nilsa told me she exchanged letters with a nephew in the United States. She had a brother who lived in Holguín. Her mother had taken ill and lived with her here until her passing. Her nephew had come to help for a time, and she sold everything she owned so her mother could eat.

  “Now I have nothing,” she said. “No material possessions.” Her eyes wobbled, but she refused tears. She straightened her back. “But my mother was able to eat, so I am happy. Nothing is more important, do you understand?”

  Later, I explained in mangled Spanish the situation with my family, that my aunts were on one side, my father and uncles on the other, and that they would not speak to each other.

  “Here is what I will do,” she offered. “Come back after dinner. I will write down my memories of Nicaro. Perhaps then they can remember again what is important.”

  At dinner, I recounted for Tatico all of what Nilsa had told me. Tatico said Nilsa talked too much.

  “But Tatico, she’s super-friendly.”

  “She’s not working with a full coconut.” He whistled and pointed to his forehead. He said she accused her nephew of stealing all her furniture. That’s why he never came to visit anymore. I told him she sold her furniture to feed her mother. Tatico shook his head. Her mother never lived with her, either. It was only after she died that Nilsa starting selling everything.

  I was spooked by the discrepancies, but Nilsa was in her 90s, and I figured she’d earned whatever stories she liked to tell herself. Her house was empty, and in her mind she had emptied it out of generosity. To be generous is to be happy. To be ungenerous is to be unhappy.

  When I came back, it was dark, but I found Nilsa sitting on her porch under a buzzing halogen lamp reading a newspaper. “Ay, Lucas!” she exclaimed, and told me to come inside. I opened the screen door and followed. She moved into a back room. There was not a rocking chair. Not a dining room table. Not a rug or wall fixture or ceiling fan. The sink drowned in pots. There was only a box fan in the window and a single folding poker table supporting a photograph of a young Nilsa and a man who I assumed was her husband, his thumbs hooked into his belt loops.

  Nilsa returned and handed me a folded piece of paper. “Memories of Nicaro,” she said. I unfolded the paper and read under a yellow lamp.

  Nicaro, 17 August 2017

  Many years have passed, but in my mind have remained, still fresh, many memories filled with respect and love for humanity.

  Of the families who left a numerous and beautiful legacy are those of the hospital: Guillermo Dumois and his collective, including Dr. Loredo; his brother, Dr. Hipólito Dumois; Dr. Hortensia, stomatology, niece of Guillermo; Dr. Ortega; also including Hernestina, responsible for the laboratory, and

  There was nothing else; the letter ended. I looked up.

  Nilsa slapped her knee. “Can you believe it? I ran out of ink!”

  In the morning, Tony drove me back to Holguín, where I picked up the Vía Azul for Havana. The bus ride took 15 hours because we stopped every 20 minutes. Passengers. Lunch. The driver buying Dora the Explorer DVDs at a roadside stand. At one rest stop, I spied an elementary-school-aged boy out the window whose shirt read, simply, FUCK.

  Night turned up, and we started letting people off the bus 15 miles from the capital, seemingly at random, on the hips of plantain fields. Ileana and Melo weren’t at the Airbnb in Havana when I arrived—it was an unceremonious exit, with only Yero and the rest of the menagerie to bid me goodbye.

  I called Dad right when I arrived back in Austin and greeted him in Spanish, wanting to impress him, but we only exchanged a few sentences before he switched to English and told me about recent back pain. I was dying to tell him about my trip, but when I brought it up, he didn’t seem interested in talking about it. When I called a few days later, he admitted that imagining me in Nicaro while he sat at home in Austin had made him depressed.

  I skirted talk of Cuba for the next week or so until finally my stepmom invited me over for dinner. We shared one of the quieter meals we’d ever eaten together. After we washed the dishes, I sheepishly asked if he was ready to see pictures. “If it’s too much, I’ll stop,” I said. “We can always look later.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I brought the album up on a computer and ran it through the television. And there it all was: Ileana and Melodí, the patio in storm, a sunny day at the Malecón. A video of ’50s Fords puttering down the highway. Dad remained noncommittal, mostly unimpressed. But when I brought up the video I’d taken in the taxi, arriving for the first time in Nicaro, Dad sat up. He started plying me with questions, asking if that was really the nickel plant now, if that was really the hospital, the American Club. He was indignant at the black earth that seeped from the hills, shaken by the absence of his family’s home, saddened by the disrepair, the rust, the decay. But in all that there was something else, too. After watching a video of the ruined pier where he had once whiled away the hours fishing with his sister, he said, “It’s probably good I didn’t go. Nothing’s the same.”

  And then I realized: it was relief. Nothing was as he remembered, to such an extent that, for him, it was not even the same place. Not the Nicaro he knew. Not Nicaro at all. And his memories were safe, preserved in the amber of forever ago.

  For months afterward, I waited for my family to express interest in our home country, but no one did. Only at the brothers’ Thanksgiving (our uncles and aunts hold separate gatherings now) did one uncle ask offhandedly how my trip was, and when I started to speak, he traveled far away, his hand holding a Lone Star against his sternum, letting my words enter the can instead of what was behind it.

  In my fantasies, my family would come to me on the mountain. I’d imagined them suffering a thirst they’d never been aware of until I gave them their first sip of the water of our country. Then they would
gorge themselves and with full bellies become docile, wonder where those four years had gone, maybe even dig up some choice morsels of Spanish in their reconciliation. But after a handful of false starts—me hedging into a story or two of my time in Cuba, my relatives unsure how or what to ask me about—there settled a deep sense of futility; I was afraid that if I tried harder to talk about it, I would gather more evidence of my family’s disinterest. I began to wonder if the whole enterprise had been a waste of time.

  Writers, however, cannot stay quiet forever, and springs will seep even from the most compact earth. Six months after I returned from Cuba, my frustration bubbled into this piece, and I sent my brother the first draft.

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it,” he said. “You never mentioned it, so I thought it was a shitty trip.” He suggested I email the whole family the pictures I’d taken during my time in Cuba. A great idea; if my stories of Nicaro made the family want to off themselves, at least I wouldn’t have to watch them resist the urge. So I went through all the photos and videos I’d taken of Havana and Nicaro and created a slide show with all the details and anecdotes I could remember. I attached it to a new email, apologizing for not having written about the trip sooner, and addressed it to every person in the family. The first time my entire family got together since Tata’s funeral was in the recipient line of an email. I hit send.

  The responses trickled in. Grateful responses, expressions of disbelief at Nicaro’s deterioration, minor keys of sadness. My youngest aunt and uncle—fraternal twins—reminded me they came to the States when they were four and remembered nothing of the island. The older aunt said she was brought to tears; the older uncle that it brought back memories on which he did not elaborate.