Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  “No,” my grandmother answers for me. “It is dark. She does not want to ride one.”

  “But I do,” I say. “I want to ride a horse.”

  Yosmany smiles and I want to lick his teeth.

  My grandmother takes a long breath and places a hand on the cane that leans against her rocking chair. “Maybe tomorrow.” She turns to Yosmany. “We are busy catching up. I have not known this granddaughter of mine in her twenty-eight years. Plus we go to sleep early.”

  “Coño, Abuela,” says Yosmany, and it bothers me that he calls her grandmother, because I have just gained possession of her for the first time. I am not ready to share.

  “How’s La Yuma?” Yosmany asks, looking at me. “Is it everything they say?”

  I start to answer but my grandmother cuts me off again. Some moments I want her closer, and then my feelings flicker, switch. I grow annoyed. I think of Maydelis’s mom, my tía Elena, saying that all her life my mother acted like she didn’t belong in the family, had been born into a family beneath her. That she spent all her time in her room and often exploded in anger at my grandmother over any little thing. And then I kind of feel it too, that maybe I was wrong to think there was something here for me, a recognizable piece of me.

  “I wish this country would become completely capitalist,” my grandmother says as if exhaling smoke. “I wish it would. Then you would see what capitalism really is. You kids, you have no idea because you didn’t see it. You’ll see what it really is.”

  “Coño, Abuela,” Yosmany says again.

  “I am tired. I’d like to go to bed now.” My grandmother folds her fan in her lap. It depicts colonial scenes, women in hoop skirts and their gallant men.

  “Pero don’t get mad, Abuela,” Yosmany says.

  * * *

  When he leaves, my grandmother’s cat Theo jumps onto my lap. He has a piece of lace in his mouth, and she has no idea where it came from.

  I stole a lacy thong once. In high school, I walked into a Victoria’s Secret and stuck it in my pocket. The clerk who caught me was named Victoria, which cracked me up. My mother fetched me from a room behind the store, where a security guard lorded over me, eyes on my cleavage. He “let me off easy.”

  My mother chastised me with a speech about Cuba. “Do you know,” she said, “that people buy steak from a food vendor on the side of the road? They think it is steak, because it is glossy. It looks juicy.

  “Do you know,” she said, “that they bite into the steak and they think, oh, this is a tough steak, and they don’t think, this is a mango peel—they don’t think, this is a mopping rag charred, marinated, blood-orange-soaked, a mopping rag resembling meat. Of course they don’t think this is a mopping rag masquerading as meat.

  “Do you know,” she said, “that there are no cats in Cuba? Think about that, Jeanette, no cats. Where do you think all the cats have gone, do you think they just disappeared overnight?

  “Jeanette,” she said, “I came here to freedom so you’d never have to steal.”

  That is what I am thinking as I pet my grandmother’s cat: I am thinking about a thong. I am thinking about stores and stories and stealing. It is 2015. Things are different in Cuba in 2015. I don’t know if my grandmother ate mopping-rag steak during the Special Period. If that ever even existed. I don’t know if she had another cat when the Soviets fell—what was it, 1989? But it is 2015 now, and my grandmother is round and portentous, nothing like my mother. She is eighty-something in a sleeveless housedress. Each time she emphasizes a word with a swipe of her arm, it jiggles like custard. Her voice, too, sprawls, coats everything like dust. Her eyes punctuate: large in delight, slanted when her statements sharpen.

  “Jeanette,” she says as if she reads my thoughts, “don’t believe the mercenary media—we struggle, but we are happy here.” Squint, slant.

  Maydelis has left the kitchen and joined us again by the doorway, waiting for a breeze. She rolls her eyes but my grandmother can’t see her. I’ve heard Maydelis rant about how she is frustrated here. I know how she feels.

  Abuela makes coffee even though outside it is dark as the chicory-laced grounds. She tells Maydelis that Yosmany invited me to ride his horse, and Maydelis snorts.

  “Don’t be silly, Jeanette,” she says, scrunching her hair into a fat pouf atop her head. “He just wants to woo you so you can whisk him off to La Yuma. Or he will spend all evening riding horses with you and then ask for a pair of sneakers and an iPhone, ha ha ha.”

  Maydelis had asked me for a pair of sneakers, but I don’t mention that. I brought her a pair of Nikes tucked in one of those fifty-pound canvas bags the Cubans call gusanos. Gusanos are worms. Back in the Cold War days, they called Cubans who left the country for Miami gusanos. I, daughter of a worm.

  “You can’t trust Black men,” my grandmother says, and I nearly choke on my cafecito.

  This I still haven’t gotten used to, the blatant racism, how it commingles with revolutionary fervor at times in the older generation in a way that seems unlikely. But perhaps I am naïve and racism among even revolutionaries is as obvious as me sticking a lacy thong in my pocket at sixteen. As obvious as the fact that I am no good.

  I say nothing.

  I want to love my grandmother, but my mother has poisoned me. She said once my grandmother loved her country more than her blood. She said my grandmother was a murderous devotee of a regime. She said I could never speak to my grandmother.

  My mother slapped me when I said I loved Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, when I said Fidel Castro was handsome in his youth. My mother told me I should never go to Cuba until That Man is dead, she wouldn’t see me to the airport. I know that she likes me here only because there is no heroin here. I know that she likes me here because Suboxone has failed me once already.

  And me? What am I doing here? I thought Cuba could be some kind of connective tissue, maybe even show me my mother. Make a piece of her make sense. I remember pressing her about why she left as the girl, Ana, watched cartoons last year, as my mother let me fail yet another person. Or perhaps I just needed somewhere to run to in this moment and only Cuba felt faintly familiar. There is no Meaning here. Only questions.

  I want to love my grandmother, but she is blank faced, spreading rice on her splintered kitchen table, picking out the black kernels and the grit. Crooked arthritic fingers, tight-lipped and unsmiling face. I want to love her but it is too quiet in this house.

  But it isn’t as though Black Cubans fare better in Miami, where racism is just slightly more polite, a little quieter. This is fact: In Miami, Cuban is synonymous with white. In Miami, Cubans will scoff when you call them Latino. “I’m not Latino, I’m Cuban,” they will say. By which they mean, I am white, another kind of white you don’t know about, outsider.

  I was ignorant. In high school, I saw a documentary about the Buena Vista Social Club, and before that I hadn’t known there were many Black Cubans. And then I asked my mother, “How come there are so many Black Cubans in Cuba and so few in Miami or are there more but they live somewhere else?” and she looked at me like the question wasn’t a question at all but bordered on insult. (Don’t ask my mother about her curly hair. Don’t ask my mother about some of her features. Don’t ask her why she hates to tan.)

  I say nothing to my grandmother. Maydelis talks about how she wishes she could travel, maybe even live somewhere else for just a little while, so she could make some money to bring back to Cuba, or maybe just get a visa to visit so she could buy stuff to sell. She reiterates for the millionth time that the average salary for a Cuban government employee is ten dollars a month. “Ten dollars!” she says.

  My grandmother pays Maydelis no mind. She cuts her off. “I know you’re probably wondering about your mother and me, Jeanette,” my grandmother says, abruptly.

  Another fact: I want to look as effortless as these women. It isn’t until Cuba that I realize how uncomfortable I am in my neatness. It seems to me the classier the outfit, the more it hides. I am
neat and a thief, recovering from a substance-use disorder, a term I didn’t know until rehab. Straight out the airport, in La Habana, I marveled at the women in their tiny sequined jeans shorts, their bra tops that exposed dimpled stomachs. Effortless. Here I am in all my imperfection, motherfuckers, their sweat-glistened skin proclaimed. Maydelis in her bootleg polo shirt. My grandmother in a satin housedress, her cone-shaped bra peeking through the armholes, her cone-shaped bra barely containing the skin that seeps over its elastic.

  “I know it’s about politics, Abuela,” I say. “I don’t care about that.”

  “It is sad,” she says, “that I haven’t spoken to her since she left. It is sad that I didn’t know you until now.”

  Maydelis exhales a wisp, sucks an ocean. “Very sad,” she adds.

  I flap my fan. Flap, flap, flap. Then I set it down. “She doesn’t know I’m here,” I say after a long pause. “I mean she knows I’m here, in Cuba, but she doesn’t know I came to see you.”

  “Will you tell her?” Maydelis asks.

  One thing I notice: fewer women in Cuba wear makeup. Some women preen in jewelry and heels, sequins and bangles, and a bare face. Not all, but many. It is too hot, probably. But I am not here to draw conclusions or take answers home. I know everyone will say in Miami, Tell me about Cuba. Most of them expecting an answer like, It is hell on earth. Or maybe a few, subversively, will ask me expecting an answer like, It is socialist paradise. I’d rather answer with a question, Tell me about the United States?

  “It’s complicated,” I say.

  “So sad,” Abuela says.

  So my mother hates her mother. There are times I thought I hated my mother, so I understand, though I wonder if only politics divided them. I grew up in Miami, yes, and watched family dinners devolve into all-out brawls over mere mention of Cuba-anything, but I am as uninterested in the familiar arguments as my cousin Maydelis, also my age. We grew up on opposite shores but equally drenched in the political, in living everything through the context of a country miles away. I understand her fatigue. I, too, am tired.

  * * *

  Maydelis and I stay up talking after my grandmother has gone to bed. We sit on plastic chairs in the hallway, which is lined with sepia photos and a termite-ridden bookcase that holds ancient-looking hardcover books. They’d be at home in any grand library, the kind where rolling ladders reach the highest volumes and portraits of old dead white men line the walls.

  I ask Maydelis about the books and she shrugs, says, “They’re just books.” But I pick one up and then another, amazed at their fragility. The two oldest-looking ones are enclosed in plastic. I take one out of its wrapping and marvel at the crinkling, disintegrating pages. CECILIA VALDÉS, O LA LOMA DEL ÁNGEL, reads the cover in embossed, faded gold. CIRILO VILLAVERDE. I flip the yellowed pages carefully until I find the date of printing: 1839. I gasp. Maydelis barely looks over.

  The next is Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, a Spanish translation. It is harder to find a date in that one but from the delicate, humidity-beaten pages, the type so faded it is barely legible, it’s obvious that the book could be a contemporary to Cecilia Valdés. I flip its pages and notice something scrawled in the margin, in black ink turned wispy gray, ornate script. I bring my face closer but can make out only the last word, fuerza. Force.

  I’ve been sober almost a year—fuck whoever says Suboxone doesn’t count—but still find myself making calculations like How much Oxy could I buy if I sold an antique book, a rare collectible? But then I remember that even if I’m not getting high, I still need money. Money my mother won’t give me anymore. Money my temp jobs hardly pay me. My mother would pay for a trip to Cuba but wouldn’t see me to the airport. My mother would pay for a trip to Cuba but would check my eyes each time I said I needed help buying groceries.

  “Maydelis, these are incredible. Where did they come from?” I ask her.

  “They were in the wall.”

  I stare at her.

  “Abuela found them in the walls of the house—twenty years ago, I’m talking about—when she was expanding the house.”

  I have heard this rumor, about valuable artifacts hiding behind the innocuous-looking plaster of homes all over Cuba, though I’ve heard only of jewels, gold, old bills now worthless; I’ve never heard of old books hidden in the walls. I have also, perhaps, assumed the story was just another exaggeration, another drama-seeped tale from my mother.

  My mother’s story was that in the 1950s and ’60s, when wealthy Cuban families plotted escape from the revolution, they sometimes hid their valuables in the walls of their homes. Back then, these wealthy families expected the revolution to fail—a year or two sunbathing in Miami, a year or two playing dominoes and staring at the ocean. Some later immigrants were allowed to leave the country with only two changes of clothing and three pairs of underwear. That was my mother.

  Any money or jewelry left behind, which the families were forbidden to take out of the country, would become property of the state. But these families, expecting to return to the island soon enough to reclaim their property and resume their wealthy lives, buried treasure in their sprawling yards, hid jewels in the foundation of their mansions, stacked cash beneath the floorboards. There were stories of some of these once-opulent homes in those once-elite neighborhoods of La Habana crumbling to ruins around the families now living in them, families whose bad luck turned once they saw sparkling rubies and sapphires beckoning in the rubble.

  “Maydelis, this is incredible,” I say once more.

  “I know,” she says, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s incredible at all.

  * * *

  I steal the book in the middle of the night. My grandmother and Maydelis are asleep. Crickets chirp and flies buzz in and out of the wooden-slat windows. So easy. I tiptoe through the hallway, grab Les Misérables off the shelf, take it to my room, and tuck it into a corner of my gusano beneath some shirts.

  In the confines of the room—my grandmother’s room, which she has given up for me, the visitor—I lie spread-eagle and watch the blades of a painfully slow fan waltz above me. I tell myself it is okay, no one will notice, that someday I will be in a better financial position and I will come back to Cuba. I will give my grandmother, my cousin, all my family whatever money the book was worth times a hundred. I wonder what an antiques dealer might pay for a rare book, how many bills that money might cover, how much rent, how many nights without sweat rolling down my forehead and into my already damp pillow. I miss the air-conditioning of my apartment in Miami. I have hated that apartment at every turn, but now I miss it. That apartment with its peeling paint and moldy bathroom, the only place I could afford after my mother cut me off.

  In the morning, I wake before my grandmother and Maydelis and make them coffee. They are amused that a Yumita like me can make good espresso on the disintegrating stovetop. My grandmother gives me seeds for the rooster and chickens and guanajos, and I walk through the dirt spreading the bounty like a flower girl at the altar. Maydelis takes advantage of the hens’ commotion to search for eggs. She tells me she loves it here, a break from La Habana’s commotion. I miss that commotion. I spent only a week in La Habana before arriving to this town with her to visit our grandmother. We fry the eggs, yolks violently red from the ateje seeds.

  I tell myself there are more books where Les Misérables came from. I tell myself no one will even notice that one book missing. I tell myself that, really, I am doing my grandmother a favor. She has no idea how valuable those books might be, and moths will surely eat them or hurricanes whip them away. It is a miracle they have survived even this long. I am saving one of the books, ensuring its place in the world, because something so precious needs a place in the world.

  * * *

  When my grandmother notices the book missing, I’ve been in Camagüey for another week. Each day has bled into the next, endless porch rocking, endless walks on dirt roads, endless visits from curious neighbors who, even miles away, learn of my arrival.


  My grandmother simply walks into the kitchen one morning as I sit peeling a mamey and says, no hint of anger or emotion, “El negro stole one of my books.”

  “What?” I say, a current running through me.

  “Les Misérables. I had a book, an original printing of the Spanish version. A rare book worth money.”

  I am taken aback though I suppose there is no reason my grandmother shouldn’t know this. I am hit once again, like so many times on this trip, with truth that doesn’t square with my notions of Cuba or Cubans. There is an interest in rare collections! And why shouldn’t there be? I assumed such aesthetic pleasures would not interest Cubans, who surely have more concrete matters to attend to, more utilitarian purchases to pine for, even to notice a valuable antique relic tucked in a dust-engulfed bookshelf. It seems another naïve notion to me now. I feel like a clumsy tourist making sense of a world that feels my own emotionally but clearly is not.

  “It is a special book. Something that had been in our family for ages. A gift from my great-grandmother. You know I hid it in the wall for years, that’s how special it is? And now he took it.”

  More that I can’t make sense of. Maydelis said that my grandmother found it in the wall. She didn’t say my grandmother was the one who put it there in the first place. Was my grandmother wealthy once, and had she wanted to leave too? It doesn’t square with her politics. Nothing makes sense.

  “Why would you assume he took it, Abuela?” I say, sliding the blunt knife away from me and placing the mamey on the table.

  “Who else?” she says. “Yesterday I went to the bathroom and nobody watched him in the living room. That negro knows more than you’d think looking at him.”

  Maydelis comes in with a plastic bag of bread my grandmother sent for from a neighbor who works at a bakery. She looks at both our faces and sets the bag down. Sweat has formed an outline of her spine through her tank top. She asks what’s going on and my grandmother repeats her accusation. Maydelis’s eyes shift to me and I look down at the fruit on the table. My heart races. I feel cold even as I sit in the unmoving hot air.