Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  “He means well,” Nancy said to her that day, “but how do you undo what is so ingrained? I mean, Roberto has so much privilege. Privilegio. Do you know what that word means?”

  Nancy liked to sprinkle her speech with Spanish even though Ana spoke English. Ana nodded though she wasn’t sure.

  * * *

  The first day they’d been in the home, Gloria had served their food in a separate part of the house, a little room off the kitchen, where the two of them could eat out of sight. But Nancy had swept in and said no, no, they were now part of the family, of course they had to eat with her and Roberto, and they had all eaten together in mostly silence as Roberto glared and Nancy directed questions that her mother answered with a quiet humility Ana had never seen in her, and she wished they could just eat, alone, in the little room so she could just stop … performing. But that was years ago. Now she liked being around Nancy. She wanted so badly to be Nancy. Not of here but with a not-of-hereness that evoked curiosity and interest, maybe humor, like when Nancy went to the mercado and her Spanish was met with amusement, with kindness. Nancy in a huipil, her hair in ribboned braids. Nancy telling the Indigenous artesanos at the market how beautiful they wove. Nancy with the not-of-hereness people smiled at, just a little bit of smirk. Said here, come, take.

  * * *

  Her mother wasn’t the doting type. Ana had made her a card once, for Mother’s Day, and written Thank you for sacrificing everything for me. “Is that what you think?” Gloria asked her that night. “That I’m supposed to sacrifice everything for you?” Ana hadn’t understood what she did wrong, what she could have possibly said that was wrong. Her mother apologized shortly after, thanked her for the card, told her that she loved her, that she was tired. She knew her mother was tired. That’s why she helped. That’s why she worked.

  That’s why she walked the blocks around Doña Nancy’s colonia watching the rich kids kick balls around the skeletons of new construction feeling so much older, too old for shrieking, too old for candy-sticky skin, too old for looking so free. Until a boy said hi one day, asked her age, until she replied with her new accent and, yes, of course, they were the same age.

  Go play, her mother would say in the early days. Go play, Doña Nancy would say, showing up from the mercado with a wooden ball on a string attached to a bucket. A doll. A Jacob’s ladder.

  Doña Nancy taking her to Cristalita to eat frozen strawberries with cream, sugared strawberries, everything strawberry in the city of strawberries, then buying her a doll. I’ve never seen anyone treat their maid like she’s their child, her mother muttered when Ana got back home with her gifts. I’m not her maid, she protested. Her mother smiled.

  When she first got to Mexico, baby deportee, the strawberries had made Ana sick. Or maybe it’d been something else. She was sick all the time at first. Doña Nancy said to her: me too.

  * * *

  They were lost or abandoned or there had been some mix-up. Or this was on purpose. A kindness? A cruelty? A trick? They’d been dropped off over the border in Mexico instead of flown to El Salvador and no one kept track of them. Everyone assumed they were traveling north. Straight off the train tracks and biding time in a city along the path. They just lay low and ducked migra like the rest, knowing they’d make their way back. The first thing her mother had done was call a cousin who lived in Irapuato. The cousin found Gloria this job. She made hardly any money, nothing even close to what she’d earned in Miami, but they had a room. Her mother told her she’d save so Ana wouldn’t have to hop trains or walk miles, if she could help it. Burn money on a van, on the most expensive guide. Months whipping by. Years. Doña Nancy: “Who’d want to leave such a beautiful country?” As if anything were about beauty. Or want.

  * * *

  Her mother wasn’t the doting type but Ana knew her mother loved her. Because, look—she, too, cried sometimes talking about the kids playing, about all the other possible lives if x or y had happened instead of z. Saying, I’m so proud of you, all the ways you help me. Gloria loved to dance but she didn’t go to dance clubs as she had in Miami anymore. And whenever Ana spied Nancy in the bathroom, carefully applying eyeliner for a night out with Roberto or her “ex-pat” friends, Nancy jiggling her hips to a radio song with a shot of tequila in her hand, she wanted her mother to be Nancy too. She wanted to grow up even faster so maybe she could set her mother free.

  * * *

  Her last year in Mexico, Gloria got sick. Fast, like one day blood in a tissue and the next there they were, the two of them, huddled in a dark IMSS hospital. (Nancy had paid a doctor to see her even though she had no papers but let them know she couldn’t pay long-term.) Doctor saying, Why’d you wait so long? Saying, I don’t know, there’s not much we can do, would the patrona pay for chemo? I don’t know, it’s so advanced.

  Walking her mother down a hallway, holding her oxygen tank. Helping her onto a bus because Nancy was working and couldn’t pick them up. How her mother placed a hand in her lap. Whispered thank you, and Ana wasn’t even sure for what.

  She remembered curling next to her mother on their twin bed, ear to her chest. To hear her heart. Each labored breath. To will each one. Please please please.

  * * *

  Money in the floorboard. Would chemo buy her more time? She could have taken it but she didn’t. She could have taken it because years later Nancy caught Roberto with his mistress, and she raged, she threw her ring down the sink, she left Mexico overnight, she said she was never coming back to that godforsaken place, it’d been her worst mistake, she left without the money, she didn’t even remember the money, she was so angry. But how could Ana know? Ana would never know. All she thought at the time was, If she took the money, and if Doña Nancy found out, then where would they go?

  8

  THEY LIKE THE GRIMY

  Maydelis

  La Habana, 2015

  It isn’t cheating if the marriage is on life support. The only reason we haven’t pulled the plug is inconvenience: scarce housing. (How many couples who hate each other still live under the same roof here, eating silent meals with the TV turned up to fill the space?)

  That’s what I tell myself as the man who is not my husband, El Alemán, helps me into the passenger seat, hands me my overnight bag. Jeanette eyes us from the back seat with a knowing smile. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” she whispers as El Alemán walks around to the driver’s side door.

  I flash a smile I hope says: Nothing. Everything.

  El Alemán squeezes in and pulls the lever at his side. “Goddamn Russian goddamn piece-of-shit cars!” he yells in English as the seat springs back and Jeanette pulls her knees in. “Who’s supposed to fit in this thing?”

  “Huh, there’s a cup holder,” Jeanette says pulling down the center partition that does, indeed, hide a cup holder.

  “I thought all you guys were supposed to drive those neat 1950s Chevrolets,” El Alemán says. “Why didn’t they give me one of those?”

  Jeanette sighs.

  “I would have brought my cafecito if I knew there was a cup holder.” She rests an elbow on the center partition.

  “Of course there’s a cup holder. What do you think this is? Mars? We’re not that backward.”

  Picture it: me and two foreigners. The patience required. Though I’m more amenable to dishing it out for my cousin than for this sunburned, blustering German on holiday. Outside, the valet porters watch us silently. They’re trying to guess the situation, this I know. Two Cuban prostitutes, one tourist? Two tourist relatives and one lucky Cuban family member? A married couple and their hustling tour guide? Porters, I’m trying to figure out the situation.

  It’s that sticky, suffocating kind of summer that makes a shower futile. Already I can taste the sweat, the brine in the air. El Alemán circles the driveway of the Hotel Nacional, Jeanette’s hotel—where I stayed last night—and turns where I direct. Then the Malecón zips by: ocean, limestone wall, no waves to temper the heat though that’s not deter
ring children in their underpants from dangling legs in optimistic anticipation. And two fishermen atop the wall, handmade poles in hand. We are nothing if not a hopeful people.

  “Even after being here for a week, it still gets me. Everything crumbling. Everything in ruins.” Jeanette points to a disintegrating apartment, a woman in a head wrap staring blankly in the doorway.

  “But a certain romance, no?” El Alemán casts a look at me. “The crumbling. Everything pastel. The ocean, ah, the ocean.”

  Any other circumstance and I’d roll my eyes at both of them. But I’ve learned a special kind of patience, a kind of mask, because tourists are easily hurt. I’ve learned it from selling knickknacks to foreigners along the Malecón. Work my husband belittles. Hustle my husband doesn’t see as work. But I make more money than he does, and he is a doctor. That’s why he ridicules me.

  What you do is you notice the little details. Like you can tell just from the clothes, you know?

  I watch the people on the Malecón as we zoom past. A woman with a small gold cross and three gold rings. Cuban-American, no doubt about it. Back from La Yuma full of gold and jewels trying to impress some folks. They like to hear how hard it is. How it’s gotten worse. Yeah, more apagones, the lights just went out yesterday, you missed it. Have you seen what they’re giving out in the ration bodegas? Real political. Everything political. If they’re real Americanized, I sell them nostalgia, postcards of an old La Habana that existed only in their dreams. I sell them misery in the hopes they give me an extra dollar or two. I gave Jeanette a print of the old Tropicana club in all its glory. “For your mom,” I said.

  We pass a young gringo, long hair pulled into a bun. Flip-flops, a seashell necklace, tank top. European. Or La Yuma. Doesn’t matter. That type: he wants to hear about the romance, about how inspiring it is to live here. But here, I have to be a little careful. I have to feel it out. Some just want to hear some Buena Vista Social Club, want to hear about how my grandma met Fidel Castro when he rolled through the city in a victory parade. But some of them, they’re real political the other way. They ask me all these complicated questions, they want to know what’s the real deal in Cuba, like there’s a secret truth. Education (is it really free?), medicine (is it really free?). And they want to hear about santería, so I pretend to practice. They want to hear about how we turn peeling apartments with sinking roofs into salsa dance clubs. I tell them I can take them someplace no tourists ever go. I have to remember, they like the grimy stuff. They don’t want the nice and clean. It’s weird. They buy the Che Guevara prints, the vintage revolution pins. Or they just give me money because they assume I need it—even better. They call me friend.

  We turn on Quinta Avenida and line up for the highway. A dozen people stand by the side of the road, waiting on a truck to pick them up. Jeanette sighs dramatically.

  And I’m thinking: a jinetera is not a prostitute. Another thing foreigners don’t understand. They think the words are interchangeable. Prostitution would be easy. Prostitution would be in-and-out, collect the cash, efficient transaction.

  El Alemán rumbles into traffic, passes a mule hauling a cart, a guajiro. “On the fucking highway,” he says. “The highway.”

  A jinetera studies, calculates. And, yes, offers sex sometimes, oftentimes. But so much more to give and parse and offer. And not just a listening ear or a compliment, these, too, the territory of prostitutes. One might, for instance, end up in a car with a US cousin and a German tourist because he wants to take us to a resort on Varadero Beach. One might put up with platitudes feigned as insight.

  A lane switch and the landscape gets more rural. More sugarcane, less rubble. Billboards: THE REVOLUTION STARTS WITH YOU. ALWAYS WITH YOU, COMANDANTE. More palm, more sky, more valley. More bodies in truck beds, hair whipping in the wind.

  “Ah, this is life,” says El Alemán.

  “The poverty. The poverty is heartbreaking,” says Jeanette.

  I just sink back. Time trickles. A countryside lullaby, highway rumble rocking. I close my eyes and picture what it would take to seduce a German tourist into falling in love with me, what it would take to convince a German tourist he needs to marry me, because he needs me, because in his mind I am everything a German woman isn’t. I am vacation, my body is vacation. What would it take to convince a German tourist to whisk me away? It happens often enough—Dianelys, Yudi, Leti, all of them somewhere in Europe. I picture how I would get from Germany to Spain, where work would be easier. Would I need to stay married for more than a year?

  Then I am awake—a side-of-the-road pork shack, El Alemán nudging me and whispering, “Need you to translate, darling.”

  We step out of the car to an onslaught of mosquitoes and calf-high saw grass, a shirtless guajiro stirring a vat in the shade of a palm hut. An hour nap? Two hours? I order three pan con pernil and the guajiro smears dripping pulled pork with mojo, a corn husk for a brush. El Alemán takes big bites, leaning on the car and bending forward as grease dribbles down his chin. Jeanette is dainty despite the oil shining her lips, the gnats circling.

  What would it take to make a cousin send for me? What would it take to convince her she needs to support me until I can get on my feet in a place like Miami, where there are so many stories like mine? Maybe I could just travel back and forth. Which would require giving more of myself away?

  “I need to pee,” Jeanette says halfway into her sandwich. She hands me her plate and opens the trunk, digs through her luggage. Toilet paper from the hotel room in hand, she elbows me and tells me to go with her.

  We leave our paper plates in the care of El Alemán and trek into the grass, the guajiro watching us from the shack and swatting flies with slimy hands.

  “How far we gonna go?” I ask.

  “Shhh. I don’t even really have to pee.”

  “What?” Jeanette grabs my wrist and pulls me closer to her. The grass has morphed into cane now. Gnats buzz in my ears when I wipe the slickness from my face. We both crouch in the shadow of the stalks like hiding prey.

  “I just couldn’t wait,” Jeanette says. “Tell me what happened. I’m dying to know.”

  What is there to say? To this cousin of mine whom I’d never met in person before? She is beautiful—fat black curls and deep-set, almond eyes. She has a strange, lopsided smile. I try to detect signs of what my aunt said when she sent the email announcing Jeanette’s trip—of the drug addiction that held her captive for years, of the drama of a failed relationship that tends to age a person. I can detect no signposts of hardship, only a brightness of the eyes, a conspiring touch on the arm that says, We never knew each other but blood is blood and we can be honest now.

  So I’m as honest as I can be with someone whose life feels so far from my own. I tell her what happened last night after she left me on the long elevated patio of the Hotel Nacional and went to bed. We’d ordered mojito after mojito (even though technically Jeanette wasn’t supposed to drink), and tipsy, I’d glanced at the Malecón below, at the couples making out under salty mist, the peanut vendors with their paper cones and singsong advertising. And I’d considered the events of the night: the unattractive German man who’d chatted us up, who’d asked so nonchalantly if we’d like to join him on a trip to Varadero. Jeanette had said no. I’d said yes. Courage up from the rum warming my throat I’d pulled her into furtive whispers in the bathroom of the hotel, not unlike our huddle under the sugarcane. And I’d told her the truth: that he’d asked me up to his room and that I intended to go. If she was shocked, she didn’t show it in her face. If she’d wondered about my husband, she didn’t ask. Perhaps those are the signposts. My cousin knew life was complicated and none of us were fully who we pretended to be.

  “But, Maydelis, what will you tell Ronny?” Jeanette slaps a mosquito on her arm and leaves a streak of blood.

  “That we drank too much. That I decided to stay in your room. And I’ll tell him the truth about this—that we decided to leave to Varadero so you could see the beach.”
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br />   “But he won’t worry that he hasn’t heard from you since yesterday?”

  “Sometimes I don’t come home, Jeanette. Sometimes he doesn’t either.”

  There. The truth. It’s out and engulfing us with the sticky country air. Jeanette doesn’t press me further. But I know what she wants to know, so I add: “The sex was okay.”

  I don’t add that he slipped me crisp euros “to buy some new clothes since you didn’t pack an overnight bag.” That something about seducing a man into offering his wallet turned me on. That it didn’t even matter who lay beneath me—it was my own smell and heat and indecency that drove me to orgasm. No, I don’t say that I fantasized myself a full-blown jinetera.

  Not that it could be my life: the fantasy would end. My skin is light, hair stringy straight. In Cuba, a white jinetera selling sex goes hungry. It’s the very young, very dark-skinned women these men are after. Everyone knows this. There are jokes even: they didn’t come here to see themselves.

  No, I wouldn’t last as a jinetera. What I need is to leave, earn some money, and come back. Buy stuff to sell here. I don’t know.

  * * *

  The German, the anomaly, is in the driver’s seat waiting when we get back.

  “I was about to go looking for you two with a machete,” he quips.

  We finish our sandwiches while he drives. We sit silently, the three of us, and watch the rural townships go by. And when we reach a small town just miles from Cárdenas, El Alemán announces that he wants to buy liquor “before the expensive tourist places.”

  The three of us are a spectacle in this town of maybe two hundred. We walk the broken sidewalks and whole families rush to the windows of their homes to look us over. At the corner cafetería, the shelves are bare. This isn’t La Habana with plenty of food and imports. The people here eye us carefully, and I can see them wondering what we have to offer. I’d be doing the same.