by Wendy Guerra
PAOLO B.: Your mother drinks exotic wines, absinthe, and rum. She drinks life, your mom.
NADIA: Absinthe and rum? The best part is that if you drink absinthe ritually, it’s like burning sugar; and rum is sugar. Are you Cuban? I don’t think so.
PAOLO B.: Are you asking because of my accent? I didn’t want to continue to be Cuban; it was a goal of mine. Nostalgia would wreck my plans; in fact, it’s something that comes back, cyclically, and upsets my world. I’ve become someone from Milan. Otherwise I wouldn’t have any of this. I live there, in an attic, and not in Havana. But in six hours I’ll be in Guarda, lakeside, working. I used to be Cuban, but I’m not anymore.
NADIA: I didn’t recognize your Cuban accent. You talk like a . . . Well, that’s fine, I get it.
PAOLO B.: I asked you to meet me here to talk about your mother. Since I can’t tell you much more, it’s probably best if you have your dessert with a friend who’s also here, alone, sitting at that little table with the yellow light. He’s a Russian artist. He has things to tell you about her. If you’ll allow me, I’ll get up, introduce you, he’ll sit here, and I’ll leave.
NADIA: That sounds like something out of a spy novel. I feel like a character out of Seventeen Moments of Spring. I don’t understand why my mother would let go of someone as special as you.
PAOLO B., smiling: Don’t flirt with me, don’t wrinkle your nose, don’t hide, because you’re not making it easy . . . Can I ask you something before I leave?
NADIA: If it’s about paying the bill, I’ll try.
PAOLO B.: No, I pay the bills here at the end of the month. There are a lot of them and they pile up. This is like my house.
NADIA: I read on the internet that Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller used to come here with—
PAOLO B.: I want to ask you to accept this, but not for meals or books or materials. I want you to use the list of stores in this guidebook and this card in your name. I don’t like seeing you in jeans; they’re too vulgar for someone who reads Anaïs Nin and chooses that coat.
NARRATOR: Nadia looks over the list and the platinum card. She stares at it and, practically holding her breath, puts it all back on the table.
NADIA: This is too much for a poor artist like me. I don’t know how to accept these sorts of gifts. This, in exchange for what?
PAOLO B.: “We’re too poor to buy cheap.” Give me one of your pieces. Something that’s not as ephemeral as your mother. I want to make something clear before I leave. She never said she had a daughter, but you look too much alike. I believe you because you also come very highly recommended by the friends I have left in Havana.
NARRATOR: Paolo B. hugs Nadia, gestures toward the Russian artist, who gets up and comes over to greet Nadia. The two men kiss goodbye, Russian style. Paolo leaves after they settle in. The Russian and Nadia make a Champagne toast.
SOUNDTRACK: Music rises . . . Rimsky-Korsakov. Scheherazade. The music then fades out with the final shot of the scene.
March 20, 2006, Moscow, Russia, Former USSR
My mother has turned up. I take a cab to go meet her. Her old friends—former pariahs, guerrillas, hippie artists, poor people—are now executives, impresarios, successful people. The others got left behind along the way. They’re either dead or no longer visible. The wall was taken down by the strong; the weak got buried under it.
My mother is here, in Moscow, with her adoptive children and her Russian husband. At the restaurant in Paris, the artist told me about my mother’s photography. I went on the internet and found her gallery and, through that, figured out where she was in Moscow. I called, using the little Russian I had learned in school in Cuba, and managed to find her.
Moscow’s streets are harsh and broad. Stern, perfectly drawn. It’s awfully cold. A strong odor, like vinegar, creeps along them. It’s a combination of fish, fruit, chocolate, and watered-down perfume. I feel my face hurt when the wind touches it. I haven’t thought about visiting museums. Is Lenin’s mummy still on display? I want to cross the bridge and go up the stairs to number 235 to meet my mother.
A letter from Saúl.
Nadia:
I have other things to do besides respond to your persecutions.
I don’t understand Cubans and their imbroglios. I went on vacation because I couldn’t take it anymore. I’m busy with the small street groups we’ve been organizing in Buenos Aires for more than a year now. Do you remember my black notebook? I don’t have time to waste.
You’ve lied much more than me. Is your father dead or alive? He’s being given a posthumous tribute organized by the Paris cinémathèque this summer. We have to see who’s tracking who in this hunting game.
Ana, in Buenos Aires, sends you a kiss. She says you know each other. Even if you don’t want it, I’m including it with this letter. See you later. Merci.
As always, Saúl doesn’t sign his letters.
Moscow is impotent. This is because of the cold.
My new Hogan boots are going to crack. Someone gives me a taste of nalivka (a very sweet liqueur). I write sheltered in an elegant café. I open a map to try to get oriented and read the guidebooks that make this endless territory so inviting.
I have to go to the Pushkin Museum, and I can’t miss Red Square, the Bolshoi. People seem very closed off here. I don’t know this culture; we coexisted “long ago and far away,” but the truth is the Soviets barely left a mark and we don’t know much about them. Along the way, I’ve seen all kinds of boutiques and restaurants. This city is huge; the scale and the real-life dimensions are impressive. It has more than 10 million residents; the subway has 150 stops. I hate the concept of a subway.
RESTAURANT GUIDE
THE FIRST recommendation is the famous Café Pushkin, in a beautiful three-story building in Tverskaya, a fantastic and luxurious nineteenth-century mansion. It’s the most glamorous place in the city for the rich, and surely jammed with tourists. The kitchen is open twenty-four hours, and the prices climb as you go up the stairs. The first floor is called Pharmacy, and dinner can be about sixty euros, but on the second and third floors you can spend as much as two hundred. It has nineteenth-century food, old-style cuisine, special recipes like, for example, some very light piroshki with several sauces, blini with caviar, game, and smoked fish. It all sounds very good, but I swear I have no idea what any of it tastes like; I think the Russians who lived in Cuba were maybe a little more modest in terms of their cooking. I remember sour cabbage-filled pastries and stuffed eggs. I remember going with my father to the Moscow restaurant in Havana, a place with varnished wood. My mother used to call it “the luxury stable.” She left, but she left us her nicknames for things, her prejudices, her craziness rolling around in our heads. Sometimes I think when people die or disappear when they’re young they can easily become myths: If they vanish quickly, they have that advantage. We don’t get enough time to see them fall apart, have regrets, or disappoint us.
My father quotes her constantly; she’s a classic, and it’s his favorite thing to do. He feeds that ghost every day.
I’d love to ask my mother to that restaurant, maybe to the first floor dining room, the Pharmacy. But it’d be in bad taste to bring her to the place where the new Russian royalty drops its money. Now I’m on Krasnoznamennaya Street, just in front of the Hotel Mezhdunarodnaya. The owner of these businesses is the son of a popular actor: Oleg Tabakov. Well, I’m not hungry anymore. I came for my mother. Eating is secondary.
I almost didn’t get the visa to come here. It seemed unbelievable, given how many Russians lived in Cuba, how much Russian food we ate, how much Russian fat (it was said to be seal fat), applesauce, preserves, Russian-Argentine meat. We even heard our lives in Russian. It’s inconceivable they wouldn’t let me in now.
I had a love-hate relationship with Russian cartoons. They could have been Russian, German, Polish . . . but we called them all Russian cartoons. We were solitary children, our parents always busy, the TV on, the screen in black and white bearing Russian letter
s.
My generation is marked by that. A Caribbean country raised with Soviet codes. I live in a cartoon: Mamushka lost and my father in a dacha far from Nadeshda, and me, a matryoshka rolling along in the real world. All my problems are stacked in order of size. They hide inside me. It can’t be normal that I miss this: дядя cтпa-милиционep (Uncle Styopa, a cop), Mikrobi, The Princess Frog, The Electronic, Choky, Little Feather, The Grandchildren of the Cedar, The Abstaining Swallow, Little Bird Tari, The Adventures of Aladár Mézga, Thunder and Lightning, The Adventures of Anita, The Fröhliche Family, Apollonia Doll, Pavel or Palle Alone in the World, The Little Sandman, and Sour Milk, with Fogón the mail carrier who brought us Muñecos magazine.
I’m a tourist in a country that, in some ways, I’m already familiar with. They made a great public intervention in Cuba. They left traces in our memories. We barely learned their language, and now they’ve forgotten us. Luckily, in a rapture about “indestructible friendships,” I was able to snatch my visa and come looking for my mother.
Koniec.
I’m still in Moscow when I should have been in New York. That’s the story. I’ve interviewed all of my mother’s friends who responded to my call. How can people describe the same person with so much contradiction? She has a thousand faces. I’ve brought my father’s films. One of them has her name as its title.
I’ve called Cuba without luck. Where’s my father now?
The cab driver says we’re here. I say, Spasiva. He responds, Merci.
I knocked on the door. They didn’t expect me. They talked to me in Russian, then in French. They asked what I wanted. They wouldn’t let me in until I could explain myself. As I did, I surveyed what was inside from the door. I was finally allowed in. I took my shoes off and stepped on the Persian rug. My naked feet followed the velvet route to my mother. They weren’t drinking tea from a samovar. They were watching TV and eating burgers, drinking Coke. My mother was sitting on the sofa, sipping her tea; she was the only face familiar to me in the living room. She offered me her cup. She wasn’t that different from other Cuban women. She looked so much like me! My emotion increased with the mystery. What an ache!
I remembered her young and beautiful in that hyperrealist painting at Havana’s Museum of Fine Arts in which she appeared to be lying on the grass. The years have changed her completely; the painting remains the same. Were her black eyes asking me who I was and what I wanted from her? I didn’t feel love. I thought we were recovering a moment, assured by being together in a secret place.
Today is March 20th. Are they celebrating something? What are they celebrating? It doesn’t matter. As my father says: “I’m here because I’ve arrived.”
I kissed my mother with an ordinary gesture and realized her perfume was the same as mine, Rive Gauche, and considered it a trap my father had set. I sat on the sofa. Little by little, I transformed into someone who lets herself attempt the impossible. I grabbed the remote and turned down the volume, changed the channels. I couldn’t understand the newscast. I just really wanted to start somewhere, to vary the images, but everything can’t be changed in a day.
My mother looked at me strangely, like a bird lost inside a supermarket. I had stretched out in front of her and was on the verge of sleep. The oldest daughter had arrived. The prodigal daughter was in Moscow, at home, in any one of my mother’s houses. A little more and I might have reached nirvana, but then I remembered: Where’s my father now?
“Merci,” I said as I sipped my mother’s tea.
Someone came with a blanket and tucked us in. I closed my eyes again . . . and that was it. I don’t remember anything else.
Good night, Dear Diary. Merci, Moscow.
I’ve arrived in Paris, with Moscow behind me and my mother waiting: plane, train, car, Saché-Calder.
I check my email. I call Havana, but there’s no answer.
Letter from Diego:
Hi Nadia,
First, I want to thank you for letting me see the sculptures at the Calder before anyone else. Being alone in that castle was amazing.
I think you forgot about my trip, but luckily I was able to get the keys and now here I am, snooping through your things, checking them out. I’m looking at your heroes as they freeze, burn, and melt; they freeze, burn, and melt forever, even before you can get over them.
To see them disappear at night and reappear in the morning is magic.
Your assistants work quickly. I imagine you as some kind of tyrant giving orders. A little socialist tyrant, to be exact: a new kind of tyrant. The truth is, I can’t imagine you giving orders at all.
To be here with the sculptures, before them, a minute before the world sees them: it’s a real privilege and, even more, a pleasure.
You’re the woman who’s brought me the most pleasure. To touch, to look, to feel, to smell, to think. Even losing you has been a pleasure.
I loved your previous show, Luxury and Poverty, so much! But this is greater; it reaches much greater heights. You start to look up, and suddenly it just flattens you with its spiral. Between the faces, the uniforms, and the constant return to the country of our memories, your mother—or mine—appears, your father—or mine—and I don’t know, you can’t stop. Your head’s disorganized, but your subconscious, yes. It’s as if all that’s lyrical and epic about that entire nation, a place that belongs to me because I love it like I love you, was brought together in those articles of clothing.
It’s so good to be without you and at your side; I swear it feels like when I land in Havana.
You weren’t here . . . Is this one of your jokes? You wanted our encounter to be with your work and not with the naughty devil you are and have always been to me? I don’t know.
In any case, I’m going back to Mexico soon, without seeing you, all the way from the frozen Paris of my adolescence, from the fiery Havana of our childhood. Between heroes and tombs, I remember you . . . Nadia. We’re on the verge of the World Cup. You can imagine what that means for a journalist like me. I’m at attention: at war, mobilized. But I’m leaving “happy and nude,” as someone I never forget once said.
Kisses, and thank you for the empty bed, which is huge. Thank you for the “tea and sympathy” of your absence. I like it more with each passing day.
Yours,
Diego
P.S. My father doesn’t remember when he last saw your mother. I’m sorry. I think it’s best he forget.
Uff! Good God! I forgot Diego would be in Paris. He wrote me. I was half asleep, but I sent him the coordinates so he could spend a few days with me. It can’t be. My mother! My life! My head can’t deal with all this. I’m down. I try to remember the song Diego liked when we were nine years old. Wait . . . I have it right here.
I go to my laptop to add it to my infinite radio playlist. I send it to him as a gift. A part of the program for Diego. A piece of audio art. A fragment to offer relief for my carelessness. Radio helps solitary people, insomniacs. In their lethargy, they hear a voice, an accent, or a melody, and that awakens certain feelings. The furious business that has our heads going in circles, going night and day, resists the dream.
A Program for Diego
Good night, Diego. This program is for you. Just you. I finally found my mom. I had to flee before you got here. I couldn’t wait for anything. I couldn’t think. I left as soon as I could. I took my coats and the map of her face in my daze. Before I go on, I’m going to give you a song. When we were nine years old, we used to sing it together in the sound booth where we made the show Good Morning, Little Friends. Everyone used to laugh at how you tried to hide your Mexican accent when you talked on official channels. Do you remember this song? “Ugly (Lo feo)” by Teresita Fernández.
The things that are ugly
give them a little love . . .
My Diego: When I was in Moscow, I didn’t see anything that moved me in any special way; it was as if I’d seen it all before. The only thing that shook me was my mother’s face aghast. I swear, dea
r Diego, that finding her has meant losing myself. I have to go back home, but holding her hand. I should guide her. She’s left her body. She’s incoherent, delirious. Her mind is hidden in darkness, submerged, and I can’t find it. It’s curious because sometimes she nails it in spite of the nonsense, but I know she’s not the same woman we lost sight of when we were ten.
Do you remember her directing our children’s programs from behind the console, talking nonstop from her mic into our headphones?
She’s not the same. We went to the Pushkin Museum together, but she didn’t pay attention to the work so I was unfocused throughout the first exhibition. I didn’t take notes in my diary. She seemed nervous, trying to get out of there, her eyes betraying how far away she was.
The line to get in was interminable. Later I understood it was really two lines, and the longer one took us to an exhibition about Coco Chanel. It was very instructive; Mami only dresses in Chanel now. I want to repatriate her, take her back to Cuba for reasons you’ll understand, but I can’t imagine her dressed like that on the streets of Havana.
We went into the museum and it was spectacular: Goyas, Matisses, Monets, Toulouse-Lautrecs. I wanted to take my time looking at them, but I was anxious, still guiding my mother; I didn’t want to lose her in the crowd.
Well, Diego, I’ll tell you what was going on while you were waiting for me at the Calder and I was finding my mother in Moscow.
This time, on this program just for you: the Moscow subway.
Did you know the stations are decorated in a very special way? Each is different: columns, gigantic recessed lights, high-hanging lamps, sculptures that allude to the new Soviet man. Without a doubt, it’s an homage to the countryside, to the worker, to the athlete, to Lenin, Lenin, Lenin.
The Bolshoi and its surroundings were undergoing a remodel. Even so, I was able to see The Queen of Spades, based on Pushkin’s story with music by Tchaikovsky. They say the theater is built over the river so the acoustics will be impeccable. This whole area is full of very pleasant restaurants.
