Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  “Pinga, qué mierda,” a man in a grubby undershirt says from a stool before the open-air counter. He’s huddled over a small antenna television tuned to baseball in black and white, slamming its side.

  “I haven’t seen one of those in decades!” El Alemán says, turning to me with elation. I smile politely.

  On the dirt road that traverses the main street of the town, a group of little girls stops jumping rope to look at us.

  “He a Yuma?” one girl asks me. She can pick out the Cuban by sight. She’s tiny but imposing, with a husky voice.

  “Shut up, Adalisa,” an older girl cautions. She holds the long telephone cord they’ve been using as a jump rope in one hand and places the other on her hip full of attitude.

  “Where’s the nearest store?” I ask the one called Adalisa.

  “For what?” she responds, looking Jeanette up and down. A man passes on a bicycle and splatters my leg with mud.

  “Rum.”

  She points toward the end of the block.

  “I’ll take you for a dollar,” says her friend. We ignore them and keep going. Jeanette glances back at the children with such a sad smile that I look away in embarrassment.

  The corner store is a wooden shack big enough for two people standing side by side. A description of goods and prices are hand-painted onto the side of the shack. The man on the other side of the iron bars watches us cautiously.

  “Tell him I want three bottles of the best rum he’s got. Havana Club,” El Alemán says to me. “And no funny business. Tell him I can see the prices with my own eyes.” I don’t say so obviously. I just tell the man we want three bottles of Siete Años. He smiles. “Yuma knows his rum.”

  “Alemán,” I correct him.

  “Same shit,” he responds.

  When we get back to the car, it won’t start. El Alemán turns and turns the key, and the engine just sputters.

  “Are you kidding me?” he shouts. “What the fuck did these people do to the car?”

  “What people?” I say, rolling down the window.

  “Obviously one of the townspeople did something to my car.”

  “Why would they do that?” Jeanette says.

  El Alemán turns the key again but the car just shakes.

  “Of course they didn’t do anything,” I say.

  “Don’t you see? They’re trying to rob us.”

  “Oh my God.” Jeanette brings a hand to her mouth. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  “That’s absurd. Do you know how quickly the cops respond to tourist complaints?”

  “Maydelis, it makes sense.” Jeanette leans over from the back seat and places a hand on my arm. “But never mind, what do we do?”

  I get out of the car and slam the door. I can hear Jeanette as I march through the dirt in my chancletas toward the cafetería, a long platform painted in peeling blue and surrounded by patches of grass. I hear Jeanette say, “Where is she going?”

  The four men watching the baseball game gather around to hear my story. I’m the excitement for the day.

  “Coño,” a dark, thick man in rubber boots says. “Let me see if señora Lilia is around. She’s the one with a phone. She lives ten minutes from here.” He gets up from his stool.

  “Wait,” I say. “Let me get the German man. He’s the one who should talk to the rental agency.”

  “Why, linda? You can talk to them in Spanish.”

  “No, no, he speaks English,” I say. “The rental agency will speak English.”

  I feel the men watch me walk away. Certain towns like this feel frozen, like time functions differently, drips through an IV. I tap the driver’s-side window, because El Alemán has locked himself into the car. He and Jeanette swelter, their faces shiny. El Alemán rolls down the window just a sliver.

  “There’s one phone in the town,” I say. “Ten minutes from here in some lady’s house. One of the townspeople will take us.”

  “Are you crazy, woman?” El Alemán shouts.

  At this, Jeanette’s eyes widen. I see her perk up. Her bracelets jangle as she crosses her arms.

  “There is no way in hell I am going anywhere with one of those people,” El Alemán says. “That’s the setup, you see? They did something to the car and now they’ll lead us over to this ‘phone,’ and that’s where they’ll rob us.” He glares in the direction of the cafetería. “Get in the fucking car,” he says.

  “No.” A knot blooms in my chest.

  “You don’t have to talk to her like—” Now Jeanette looks angry.

  “You have a better idea?” I say to El Alemán. His face is turning red, redder than its natural red.

  I see Jeanette shift in her seat and bite a nail. She eyes El Alemán and then looks at me like she’s trying to communicate something with her eyes. Her lips curl.

  “Tell the Black one to go himself,” El Alemán says. “Tell him to call a mechanic. Tell that worthless thief I’ll give him a dollar and that’s all he’s getting from me.”

  Now Jeanette opens the door and comes to stand beside me. “Qué comemierda este viejo,” she says in accented Spanish, and I try to stifle a laugh.

  “You’re going with her?” El Alemán says. “Well, I guess I’m the only one who values my life.”

  Jeanette ignores him. She takes my elbow as she did in the sugarcane field, only she’s gripping me harder now. We start walking toward the cafetería.

  The men have gone back to their baseball game. The whole town is silent, so different from La Habana. The only sound is the drone of the television.

  “You really don’t think someone did something to the car?” she asks when we’re out of earshot.

  “No,” I say. “That’s not how it works.”

  “How what works?”

  “You make friends, not enemies, if what you’re after is money.”

  “The Black one,” it turns out, has a name. Reinaldo. He offers to take us to señora Lilia’s house to use the phone. He walks with a long gait, arms swinging at his side, periodically wiping his face with a corner of his yellowed tank top and exposing his belly to us. He knows everyone we pass, and they yell greetings to one another. Some people ask him point-blank: Who are they? Why are they here?

  I notice a change in Jeanette when El Alemán isn’t with us. She slips more easily into Spanish, seems to swing her hips a little more loosely. She snaps back at the men who catcall with empty, bored faces, throws curses and friendly jabs right back at Reinaldo. I settle, relieved, into the role of participant, no longer the guide.

  “But what’s the problem, though?” Reinaldo says to Jeanette.

  “Coño, how am I supposed to know? It just doesn’t start.”

  “Pssssh,” Reinaldo says through his teeth, gnashing on a cigar.

  I feel the buzz of a mosquito at my neck and hope they won’t make a feast of us by the time we leave. We turn right, following Reinaldo, onto a dirt path that runs between two Soviet-era complexes. Laundry swings from window to window, flapping in the dust, and chickens wander in and out of the building’s entryway. I can see a couple faces through the iron bars of the windows.

  “Why you wanna go with that viejo anyway?” Reinaldo says in my direction, but still looking at Jeanette. “You take me, I’ll show you a good time. Got my own car and everything.”

  Jeanette starts to say something but I cut her off. “You gonna pay for the hotel?”

  “Psssh,” Reinaldo says again.

  Once, Ronny and I went on vacation, staying at a beach house in Santa María del Mar, a reward from his boss for the best doctors. The house itself was falling apart. All night I heard mice skittering along the walls and huge palmetto bugs flying in and out through holes along the baseboards. The beach, too, was far less appealing than the tourist beaches, which in those days were still off-limits to Cubans like us: murky water, garbage along the shore.

  But Santa María del Mar is still my favorite memory of the two of us. Just an hour from home, we were unfamiliar friends
again, hand in hand, sleeping naked in bed to escape the heat, the slow ceiling fan whipping my long hair over his chest in a steady, slow rhythm. This is how most relationships must end, I think. Slow and without drama or pandemonium, without reason: just two people who become accessories to the bland survival of the everyday.

  When we returned to La Habana, a leak had ripped a chunk of plaster from the ceiling and it took us months to find the money and materials to fix it. Meanwhile there were buckets to catch water each time it rained and we stopped speaking of the nonessential. We wrote for money from Jeanette’s mom in Miami to fix the hole in the ceiling. Then the sky was gone, and the house was dark again.

  * * *

  We get to the house with the phone. It’s a squat, corrugated-roof hut surrounded by identical ones. There is a concrete porch, where an old woman with dark sunspots sits on a rocking chair, fanning herself. Bougainvillea vines snake around the house and blossom out into the sun.

  “Señora Lilia,” Reinaldo says.

  The woman smiles and smooths her white hair. She introduces herself when I hand over a few coins for the phone call.

  Jeanette offers to pay but she’s carrying only divisa, not moneda nacional. Constantly she complains about the unfairness of the double-currency system, about how mad she feels paying a commission to exchange dollars into CUCs. There seem so many other easy injustices to point to; I’m frequently amused by what catches her fancy.

  In Lilia’s stuffy living room, packed to the brim with trinkets and religious figures, I dial the number on the rental car contract while Jeanette sits on the porch, smoking a cigarette with Reinaldo and pretending she doesn’t notice him creeping in, flirtatious, going for the foreign kill. I watch them through the wooden slats filtering dusty light into Lilia’s tiny living room. The whirr of a refrigerator reaches all the way to me, and I can’t hear what Reinaldo and Jeanette are saying outside. The sheets hanging in place of doors inside the house rustle with a sudden breeze.

  The rental agency, unsurprisingly, is less than helpful. It will take them hours, maybe four or five, says the high-pitched woman on the other end of the line. They don’t have anyone, she explains, anywhere near us. She shouts questions at other people in the office, whom I can hear only through muffled replies. Yes, four to five hours, she confirms. I give them an approximate address, and the woman laughs. “En casa del carajo,” she says.

  Outside, Lilia has joined Reinaldo and Jeanette. They are doubled in laughter, some joke I’ve missed.

  “It’s going to take all day,” I announce, puncturing the group’s joy with bad news.

  Jeanette looks troubled, Reinaldo unsurprised. Lilia is bored again, fanning herself.

  We decide on a plan: We will go back to the car, and on the way, Reinaldo will stop by the house of his buddy who, he says, “can fix anything from a TV antenna to a rocket ship.” His buddy will see if he can get the car running. I will distract El Alemán somehow. Or bear his anger and paranoia, hoping he doesn’t insult Friend of Reinaldo and leave us to the rental agency, which, I predict, will take double their time estimate. We set off after kissing Lilia goodbye.

  We pass the apartment complex again. We step from the dirt road onto the sidewalk that crosses the whole small town, walk under the shade of sprawling trees and past empty stores, wave hello to a man on horseback dragging a cart full of vegetables. We answer questions from a few nosy townspeople. See the girls jumping rope again.

  It’s all so familiar, but then midway back, Jeanette surprises me.

  “What if,” she says, glancing away from Reinaldo and lowering her voice, “we pay someone to drive us instead? What if we run off and leave El Alemán?”

  I think she’s joking, so I laugh, shield my eyes from the sun, and kick away the branches along our path as a red-skinned dog wanders by our side, scratching itself.

  “I’m serious,” she says. “What do we need him for?”

  The dog’s rib cage is outlined like a dental impression. It looks up with droopy, sad eyes.

  “Don’t you remember? He was going to pay,” I say, “for the hotel in Varadero. It’s expensive.”

  “Psshhh,” Jeanette says, sounding like Reinaldo in a way that annoys me. “We don’t really need to go to Varadero anyways. Isn’t it just full of tourists?”

  “Yeah, and beautiful beach.” I want to say that she is a tourist but hold my tongue. “Where would we go if we don’t go to Varadero? Back to La Habana?”

  “You don’t want that, do you?”

  Ahead of us, Reinaldo shoos the dog away. I look up at the sun filtering through the branches of a tree until my eye squints of its own volition. I think of Ronny playing dominoes on the promenade in front of our house in Playa. I think of the hole in the ceiling, which still leaks even though he “fixed” it. I think of Ronny in his checkered shirt with a Bucanero in hand, arguing loudly with passersby for hours.

  “No, I don’t,” I say.

  “What about Camagüey?” Jeanette says. “I always wanted to see Grandma Dolores’s house.”

  I swallow hard and look at the orange outline of dirt on my white sandals. Something has ruptured on the car ride here. Maybe something ruptured long before that. Fuck it, I think, picturing El Alemán receding in the background, picturing my husband. Wondering if I’d have to send Ronny money from Miami. How else would he agree to a divorce? And knowing the truth though I won’t let myself near it: I’m probably never leaving—not the country, not Ronny. But I need the fantasy. I need the made-up plans. Auf Wiedersehen, Germany. Adiós.

  “What about Santa María del Mar for a few hours and then Abuela Dolores’s house?” I say.

  She smiles and takes my hand. “A beach is a beach, no?”

  I feel shivers of exhilaration, an exhilaration I’d felt the night before, convulsing man beneath me, shouting my name like he worshipped at my feet. The rest is easy.

  Jeanette offers Reinaldo more money than he’ll see in months, fifty or sixty US dollars. We offer to fill his tank too. I don’t know the address of the beach house, but Reinaldo knows how to get to Santa María del Mar and I’m familiar with the area. I’m nervous, but I tell El Alemán the rental agency has someone on the way. It’s not a lie, and that makes me feel better. I tell him Jeanette and I are going in search of a bathroom and need our bags to freshen up. He tells us we’re asking for trouble, and I wonder if he means murder or rape or something else entirely. I don’t wait long enough to find out.

  Reinaldo, Jeanette, and I turn the corner past the cafetería, and I glance back at the rental car, stout and red, in the middle of a barren field like a miniature barn house in all those US movies. I see El Alemán shading his eyes and looking small. We run. We run in the direction of Reinaldo’s house two blocks away and hop into his car. Then the wind is whipping at my face again and all the island feels like a blur.

  9

  PEOPLE LIKE THAT

  Jeanette

  Camagüey, 2015

  We are sitting in rocking chairs by the front door, open to a field of guava bushes, when a man arrives. My grandmother introduces him as her neighbor; he says he heard she had a visitor from the United States. He is my age and Black. My grandmother squints her eyes when he speaks, but I can’t read her response. Maydelis seems uninterested in the man. She stubs her filterless cigarette, the ones offered at the bodega, and leaves for the kitchen without saying a word to him. The man wears red skinny jeans, a red-and-white polo shirt. He has a kind of mohawk buzz cut. I follow Maydelis to the kitchen to fetch the visitor a beer because that seems like the thing to do.

  “Repartero,” she says. Maydelis settles at the little kitchen table beside the ancient stove and pulls out another cigarette. She sucks hungrily and blows delicate wisps and I wonder where the rest of the smoke goes, does it just sit inside her?

  “Don’t you see how he dresses, his fake-diamond earrings?” she says.

  “Repartero?” I repeat and she sighs.

  I’ve been in Cuba
only a week, but I sense she is tiring of me. She spent days guiding me all over La Habana, answering my questions like a mother explaining the basic ways of the world to a child. She has brought me to this tiny town in Camagüey, to the campo, to meet my grandmother, but I sense she’d rather be anywhere else. All she wants to talk about is the United States, what it’s like over there. I do not tell her I have come to visit Cuba because I have nothing left over there. That I am over there’s worst representative.

  “A repartero is a kind of person,” Maydelis says. “They dress like reggaeton stars. They have no class, if you know what I mean. They talk bad.”

  I do not know what she means, but she lists kinds of people that exist in Cuba—freakies, emos, Mickeys, repas. She lists what they wear and what music they listen to and where they hang out and I realize every country is different but the same. Every country has its own lunch tables. I open the massive ice box, shuffle past slabs of mamey and fruta bomba, cheese wrapped in wet cloth, until my hand reaches a cold Cristal. I can sense Maydelis wants to say more, but I leave her in the kitchen because I am curious about the visitor. I am more curious about the visitor than “kinds of people.”

  When I hand the beer to him, my grandmother wiggles in her chair and settles back. The man smiles at me, and my grandmother is not unfriendly but she does not smile.

  “I have horses,” the man says to me. His name is Yosmany, he says. “I have two.”

  He says it like a question and my grandmother and the man look at me like they expect a response.

  “Horses?” I say. The sun is setting and the mosquitoes are out in full force. I slap one on my thigh and it sticks to my skin, a tiny carcass.

  “You want to ride one?” Yosmany asks. Something about the way he smiles reminds me of Mario and I feel the familiar gut punch, the craving.