The Best American Travel Writing 2013

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  We arrived at the house of some cousins, two twins, small men now in their 50s, one with a mustache and one without, who live with their mother, whom they tend to hover about protectively. Their father died after having walked himself to the hospital, after a heart attack. Nobody had a car, nobody’s phone worked. The revolution is famous around the world for its health care, but for a Cuban, that care can be hard to access, especially if you live far from one of the major cities.

  The six-year-old and her cousin were sitting on the sofa, ignoring everyone. They were holding up dolls to each other in different poses, sort of: “What do you think of this? Do you approve of this?” We unloaded the presents we brought for the twins. They handed my wife a book of socialist Cuban film reviews from before the revolution, actually a rare and useful book—one of them is a from-home bookseller, and he had come across it somewhere.

  As we were standing around he said, “Did you know that my brother”—the one with no mustache—“was on a game show?”

  They brought forth a VHS tape and started reconfiguring the wires to make the VCR work. Soon a picture of the studio appeared, three contestants behind their buzzers. The tape had been recorded over many times. There was a constant flickering of white meteors across the image. Felipe to the far left, smiling, looking confident in a light green short-sleeved shirt. The game had to do with rhyming. They would say, “Two words: one of them describes a fruit, one describes a family member.” Answer: lima and prima. Felipe didn’t win, but did well enough, as I understood it, to be invited back. He looked onscreen like he was having a great time. The show had a carefree attitude, compared with something similar in the United States. The stakes were very low. You can’t have games of chance or leisure games involving any amount of money, they said. It was outlawed by the revolution, as part of the purifying backlash against the mob-led casino power. So the prizes were things like a signed poster of a famous Spanish pop singer or a decorative mirror. Nobody was going to cry over losing. We congratulated Felipe on having held his own. He brought out the small metal lamp-sculpture he won.

  Before we left the country, we spent a last day and night in Havana. Heaven weather. We stepped into the grand cathedral, on one of the main squares in the old part of town, and listened to a women’s choir that was practicing for the pope. I saw blue-and-red signs announcing his impending visit,VIENE EL PAPA! The women and girls were dressed in their everyday clothes. They sang beautifully. I’m sure that they were the best that Cuba had.

  In the evening, we stood on the Morro, the Spanish castillo across the bay from the Malecón, and looked at the city. There is a Havana—this was the second time I saw it, a confirmation—that cannot be captured in photographs, because it involves a totality of light from symphonic Caribbean clouds and the way they play on the whole city, and that appears often enough to represent one of the characteristic faces of the city. The diffused light turns all the buildings a range of pastels. Then as the sun reddens, it becomes rose-colored.

  It was 9:30 by the time we got back to our hotel. Normally that would have been past the six-year-old’s bedtime, but my wife had a telephone interview—meant to happen during the day, it got bumped—so she needed us out of the room for an hour.

  Downstairs we sat and listened to the band do the inescapable (in Havana) “Hasta Siempre, Comandante,” with its strange lyrics, “Here lies the clear/the precious transparency/of your dear presence/Comandante Che Guevara.” Cats were slinking around. The people going by were of every shade, and many with striking faces. In the most Spanish faces you could see flashes of the Old World stock that supplied the island with settlers: the equine noses, the long mouths, at times a Middle Eastern cast, features I knew from my wife’s family pictures.

  On the sidewalk a young bicycle-taxi driver named Manuel approached us, a well-built kid in jean shorts and a tank top, about 19. He said he knew an ice cream place that was still open. We set out through the night. Many of the streets were dark. It was chilly already, and the six-year-old huddled against my side. It was one of those moments when you know that you are where you’re supposed to be. If your destiny wavered, it has at least momentarily recovered its track. We ate our chocolate ice cream at an outdoor bar, under a half-moon.

  On the way back to the hotel, Manuel asked what I did. When I told him I was a reporter, he said: “You’d hate it here. There is no freedom of expression here.”

  He launched into a tirade against the regime. “It is basically a prison,” he said. “Everyone is afraid.”

  The things he said, which I had heard many times before—that you can go to prison for nothing, that there’s no opportunity, that people are terrified to speak out—are the reason I can never quite get with my leftie-most friends on Cuba, when they want to make excuses for the regime. It’s simply a fact that nearly every Cuban I’ve ever come to know beyond a passing acquaintance, everyone not involved with the party, will turn to you at some point and say something along the lines of, “It is a prison here.” I just heard it from one of the men who worked for Erik, back in the hometown. I remarked to him that storefronts on the streets looked a little bit better, more freshly painted. It was a shallow, small-talky observation.

  “No,” he said, turning his head and exhaling smoke.

  “You mean things haven’t improved?” I said.

  “There is no future,” he said. “We are lost.”

  The six-year-old kept asking me what Manuel was saying. I was doing my best to describe el sistema. Interesting trying to explain to a child educated in a Quaker Montessori school what could possibly be wrong with everyone sharing.

  We passed the museum with the Granma, the leisure boat that in 1956 carried Fidel and Raul and Che and Camilo Cienfuegos and 78 other Cuban revolutionaries from Mexico to a beach on the island’s southeast coast. The cruiser was all lighted up with aquamarine lights, in a building made of glass. It looked underwater. Manuel stopped the bicycle-taxi and gazed on it with obvious pride.

  “There’s always an armed guard in front of it,” he said, nodding his head toward a young man in a green uniform, who was standing with a machine gun over his shoulder.

  “They’re worried that someone will try to blow it up or something?” I said.

  “They’re worried that someone will steal it and go to Miami,” he said.

  There was a time Mariana took me to Cuba, and we went to a town called Remedios, in the central part of the island. It is one of the most ancient Cuban cities. The church on the main square dates from the Renaissance. When it was restored in the 1950s, the workers discovered that under the white paint on the high ceiling was a layer of pure gold. The townspeople had safeguarded it from the pirates in that manner. We stayed in the home of a man named Piloto. A friendly bicycle-taxi driver, who introduced himself as Max, told us that Piloto worked for the government and rented out his spare room only in order to spy on tourists, and that we should be careful what we said there. But all we ever got from Piloto and his wife was a nearly silent politeness and one night a superb lobster dinner. My most vivid memory of Remedios is of being taken to the house of an artist who lived there, a woodcarver. The bicycle-taxi driver told us that anyone who had “a great interest in culture” needed to visit the home of this particular artist. The next day he took us there, in the afternoon. We rode behind a row of houses that had strange paintings and animal figures hanging in their breezeways. After what seemed a long time for a bicycle-taxi ride, we arrived at the woman’s place. Taking out a cigarette, Max told us to walk ahead, he would wait. At the door of a small, salmon-colored house, an old woman met us. Not the artist, it emerged. This was the artist’s mother. We sat with her in a kind of narrow front parlor, where she made sweetly formal small talk for maybe 20 minutes, telling us every so often that the artist would be out soon.

  At a certain moment, a woman appeared in the passageway that led from the front room into the main part of the house, a woman with rolls of fat on her limbs, like a baby, and s
kin covered in moles. She walked on crutches with braces on her knees. She had a beautiful natural Afro with a scarf tied around it. She was simply a visually magnificent human being. She told us the prices of her works, and we bought a little chicken carving. She said almost nothing otherwise—she had difficulty speaking—but when we stood up to leave, she lifted a hand and spoke, or rather delivered, this sentence. It was evidently the message among all others that she deemed most essential for U.S. visitors. “I know that at present there are great differences between our peoples,” she said, “but in the future all will be well, because we are all the sons and daughters of Abraham Lincoln.”

  KEVIN CHROUST

  The Bull Passes Through

  FROM The Morning News

  DAN IS IN, Brian is out, and I suppose I am 51 percent in and 49 percent out. I am going with Dan into a walled-off, maybe 25-foot-wide street. People above us, in positions of safety, gaze down with looks of concern.

  “Give me your stuff,” Brian says, and Dan and I empty our pockets and hand him our sunglasses.

  I keep my credit card, my driver’s license, 50 euros cash, and my insurance card in the buttoned back pocket of my white linen pants. We shake hands and he pats us on the back. We don’t try to convince him to reconsider because this is not the kind of thing you can fault someone for skipping. And if we convince him to do it and he gets hurt, we have to pay a doctor to fix him and a therapist to fix us.

  “See you outside the stadium at the ticket window,” I say, and turn and walk into one of the more famously dangerous places to be on July 7 every year.

  The faces of people down here with us tell a story much more pertinent to my situation. Some look fast, well prepared, dressed almost exclusively in white with red accessories—neckerchiefs and shawls in San Fermín tradition. Some look drunk, like they haven’t been to bed since this 204-hour party started 19 hours ago; many of them will be thrown out of the route by the policía before 8 A.M. We fall somewhere between. We are not drunk, but our white clothes are soaked in red sangria from the opening ceremonies. We went to bed early, but did not sleep well and do not feel well. If we were still 22 we’d be drunk.

  Dan is very fast. I think I am probably faster than most of the people down here. But after speaking to people in this town for the past 36 hours, I’ve gathered speed doesn’t much matter. This is not a race. No one is PR-ing today. No one is qualifying for Boston. Speed doesn’t much matter because something like a dozen bulls are being released at the sound of a rocket, and they are going to catch whomever they want.

  We walked the course the night we arrived in Pamplona. We are now on Day 12 of a 13-day, mostly sleepless trip to Italy and Spain. It is 7:15 A.M. on Saturday, July 7—the first day of the Running of the Bulls. Because it is the first day and it falls on a weekend this year, the route is crowded with spectators and runners. We fly home to Chicago tomorrow from Madrid, assuming there are no overnight hospital stays.

  In 45 minutes, those bulls, weighing something like a thousand pounds each, are going to come charging after me and every other person on this cobblestone road who feel the need to put their life in arbitrary danger. Until then it is going to be a long wait, and I imagine an even longer five-minute run down this 848-meter stretch of narrow, enclosed road that more closely resembles the sidewalks and alleys I’m used to in the United States. This is particularly scary for me because before Thursday night, the biggest bull I’d ever seen was Bill Wennington.

  It’s a fact: people are going to get hurt. It happens every year. People are gored, thrown, trampled by humans, trampled by bulls. Sometimes people die, though no one has been killed running since 1995, according to Dan.1 People down here with Dan and me are hugging, saying good luck in Spanish and English and Aussie English, trying to stay positive with each other, but looking at friends with faces that say something serious. According to the locals I’ve spoken to, most of the people who get hurt are foreigners—most of them don’t know what to do.

  “One last thing,” I say to Dan. “Let’s agree that neither of us should feel pressured to do this just because the other is. This is an individual choice. Neither of us hassled Brian and for good reason. Don’t feel like you have to be here because I’m here, and I’m not going to feel like I have to because you’re here. We still have time to get the hell out.”

  Dan nods his head. I honestly don’t think he has reconsidered this since we booked our trip two months ago. If he is scared, it isn’t showing.

  “I’m doing it,” he says. “I’m here. I’m doing it. I have to.”

  For the last few months, I legitimized running with the bulls by telling people I played soccer in high school and am generally faster than most people. One hundred percent of the people I said this to laughed. Somehow they knew already that speed is going to be as valid as spandex on a bike ’n’ brew.

  A television camera is panning across our faces as we speak. I try to hide the worry. I think about my mom. I think about my family together at our cabin in the Wisconsin Northwoods, fishing, skiing, playing the Rolling Stones, safe, worried. I sat up all night in our hotel room while Dan and Brian slept last night, all of us in the same bed, and I still can’t tell if I’m doing this as one last adventure before I make a serious attempt at settling down or if I’m doing this because this is what I’m turning into: a true model of self-destruction.

  “In situations like this,” I say, “I always get the feeling that if someone is going to get hurt, it’s going to be me.”

  “Why’s that?” Dan asks.

  “I suppose because I’m always the one who gets hurt.”

  We’ve done some stupid things on this trip. In Cinque Terre we jumped off rocks into the sea at two in the morning after watching Italy beat Germany in the Euro semifinals. In Barcelona, I got robbed on the way back to our apartment at four in the morning, and we all got molested by prostitutes afterward.

  We came to Pamplona on a bus Thursday and went to a bullfight. I don’t agree with Hemingway. I don’t know much about bullfighting, and maybe it was different in 1923, but from what I witnessed Thursday night, I think matadors are bedazzled cowards. They stack the deck like a Vegas house stacks slot odds. It is a spectacle of disingenuous sacrifice driven by tradition and profit. The bull is half-dead, tired, maimed, and there against its will. The matador is armed, which I suppose is understandable when facing a bull, but there’s also a group of other matadors ready to jump in and divert the bull from a deadly attack.

  But on this street right now, those advantages have flipped. We have numbers, but too many numbers—numbers that will force us into uncomfortable places we don’t want to be where bulls are likely to find us. The locals told us this yesterday. One pretty Spanish girl and her grandmother spent an hour trying to talk us out of it. They, along with others back in Madrid, succeeded with Brian. The girl, Cindy, said at least 50 times in her Spanish accent, Don’t do eet, and Do not raan a hundred. When I refused to give in, her grandmother, who didn’t speak a word of English and hated Dan, just shook her head, grabbed my sticky, sangria-soaked cheeks with her wrinkled hands, and kissed me on the lips before she left. Before the trip, I had only gone up in age 3 years. Now I have gone up 50.

  “If you could do it again, would you do anything differently?” Dan asks.

  “Today or in life or on this trip?”

  “Any.”

  I think for a quick moment about plenty of things that apply in my life and give a bland reply. “Nothing major. You?”

  “I never would have gotten a dog with the ex,” Dan says. “I loved that dog, but after our relationship ended, it caused us so many unnecessary problems. Don’t get a dog before you get a ring.”

  I think about my ex as well and the things I would do differently now that might have put us on a different path, a path that wouldn’t have me on a street this morning with bulls.

  More people have gathered in from the bottom of the street, more people leave our area and walk farther up the
road. And then a man passes out standing, angling forward without his knees buckling, and lands square on the side of his face on the street. The thud sounds like someone threw a 150-pound piece of clay from five stories up. People rush to him and call for a doctor. They turn him over. His face is covered in blood and he is unconscious. A doctor arrives and tries to wake him. Paramedics follow with a stretcher. We watch as they take him away. He will not be running with the bulls, but he will be among the injured.

  We talk about our plan of action one last time. We remind each other to stay to the inside on the turns. We remind each other that the most important thing is to keep our center of gravity so we stay on our feet.

  “If you lose a shoe, keep going,” Dan says.

  “Yeah, glass in your foot is better than being trampled—by people or bulls.”

  “If you fall, don’t try to get up. Just cover your head and roll to the side.”

  “And if you see a bull on its own, try to get out.”

  This last point may be the most important in terms of living and dying. From what we’ve been told, bulls together are not as frightened as bulls alone. Bulls together tend to stay on a path, assuming they keep their footing. Frightened bulls directly charge people. If we see a bull alone, we will try to escape by climbing one of the wood fences. We climbed them yesterday. It can be done quick, but the problem now is there are so many spectators lining the street that you’d have the same success climbing them as jumping through the horizontal gaps between the beams.

  “Sorry for calling you a douche in Madrid,” Dan says.

  “Thanks for calling me a douche in Madrid,” I say. “I deserved it.”