“I will report him,” my grandmother says. “I will report him to the Comité. I will report him to his workplace. I will even call the police.”
“Wait, wait,” Maydelis says. “Let me talk to him first.”
“Are you out of your mind?” My grandmother places a hand on the table to steady herself. She breathes hard.
“Sit,” I say, getting up and guiding my grandmother toward my chair. I still don’t dare look at Maydelis.
“I—think I can reason with him, Abuela. I won’t go alone,” Maydelis says. “Jeanette will go with me. Let us try that first at least.”
“You can’t trust people like that,” my grandmother says, placing a hand over the knife I have discarded. “If they don’t do it on the way in, they do it on the way out.”
I have heard that racist Cuban expression from my mother so many times.
My grandmother turns to face me. “Do you see what Cuba is becoming?”
* * *
I decide to avoid Maydelis until the moment of our walk to Yosmany’s house. I wonder if she really intends to go, or if she plans to confront me. For hours I hole up in my room and pretend to nap. I creep to the door to listen for bits of conversation but I hear nothing about the book or about the neighbor. When I do leave the bedroom, there is no one in the hall.
So I slip the book from my bag and place it back on the bookshelf in its original enclosure, where two books now slant toward the void. I consider saying I just borrowed it, I wanted to read it, but it’s too late for that. Besides, my grandmother and Maydelis know I can barely read Spanish.
I scour my hands as if I can wash away the ugliness eating at me. I scrub and scrub until my hands are raw, and I remember that water comes every other day here in the campo, that my grandmother doesn’t have a tank to store extra gallons, as Maydelis does in her home in La Habana.
When I leave the bathroom, Maydelis stands in the hallway, looking at me. Her hair is plastered to her wet forehead. She wears tiny shorts and flip-flops. One hand is on her hip in that very Cuban back-of-the-hand pose that betrays her real emotion. “I guess Abuela didn’t look too carefully at the bookshelf,” she says, not taking her eyes off me.
“What do you mean?” I can hear the catch in my own voice.
“The book is there.”
“Oh,” I turn my back to her, already heading to my room. “That’s good news then. We don’t have to look for Yosmany.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Good news for Yosmany.”
I almost add, And Abuela—but I can’t bring myself to say it.
I can hear her, Abuela Dolores, humming to herself in the kitchen. She is making my favorite, fricasé de pollo. Maydelis and I will return to La Habana tomorrow. Then a few more days and I fly back to Miami. And for no real reason, what I think about in that moment is that photo that came out in some of the Miami newspapers a little while back, Fidel Castro’s son Fidelito, beaming, a beard like his father’s, arms around Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell at some grand celebration or other in La Habana.
How far away that glamour feels from the campo, not so much in an economic sense but because news is slower, time trickles. There are luxury stores that sell Versace to tourists in La Habana now, but here oxen still till the land and my grandmother just wants a place to buy cumin that isn’t a flight away. She says cumin has disappeared.
“It was me,” I say to Maydelis, and all we can hear is my grandmother’s humming.
“I know,” she whispers, and I wait for her to ask me why but she doesn’t. I wait for her to ask why so I can confess that I think there is nothing I will ever be good at and no way that I will ever make up for the person I’ve been.
“You know,” Maydelis says, fanning herself, “I thought after this—after we’d met each other for the first time like this and spent all this time together like this—I thought you might send for me. I might try for a visa. I thought you would help me like that, but I realize now you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do that for me.”
“Of course I would!” I say, but she is right and I am stunned. I want to say that it’s not so easy, that I am a screwed-up recovering addict who lives in a moldy apartment and that I can barely support myself, much less someone else, and I almost, almost want to say, It’s not that bad here, but then I know she’s liable to ask me why I don’t stay then—and I don’t have an answer.
She walks away. Pulls a cigarette pack from her back pocket and leaves through the door.
I start to follow, but my grandmother sidles up beside me with a spoonful of the chicken stew, blowing over it. “Prueba,” she says, and sticks the spoon in my mouth.
I can taste the tomato, garlic, onion, the cumin she’s just run out of. The fricasé burns my tongue, but I say, delicious.
She takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen. We pass the bookshelf. “I shouldn’t have assumed Yosmany took it,” my grandmother says, turning to me, and I know that Cuba belongs to me even less than I ever believed.
I say nothing, but I pick up the book again and it feels heavier than before. I turn to the page with the faint ink and hold it up to the light as she watches me.
We are force, the ink reads in perfect script. Such an inscrutable thing to write in a book.
I look at my grandmother and think, I am forced to love you. But then, You are forced to love me too.
In the kitchen, we sit and wait for the hours to pass. Maydelis joins when she’s finished smoking. The goats are bleating outside, and I can hear two people shouting in the distance. I can’t tell if they are fighting, or joking and laughing. The kitchen smells like cumin and something else, something I can’t identify, something ancient.
10
THAT BOMBS WOULD RAIN
Dolores
Camagüey, 1959
The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, his two-year-old daughter learned to say coffee. She sat in the wooden high chair that he built himself, and Dolores had just placed the cafetera on the stove and turned up the gas. Little Elena wiggled her hands in the air. She said, “Mamá, café!” except she couldn’t pronounce her f’s yet, so it sounded more like cah-weh.
Dolores laughed. Daniel laughed. He readied for work cutting caña as Dolores served three little cups of espresso: for her, Daniel, and their older daughter, seven-year-old Carmen. Dolores dipped her pinky into her cup and placed it in Elena’s mouth. The toddler latched on to the tip of her mother’s finger—Dolores had weaned her last year, but the little mouth didn’t forget how to suckle with abandon. Elena, true Cuban, loved coffee at two years old.
Daniel’s political convictions had emerged only a couple of years before. At first, Dolores feared the outcome. But as Daniel grew angrier in those years, she longed for those moments he’d sit on a stool in one corner of their two-room house, too busy fiddling with the radio dials to pay much attention to her. Radio Rebelde, the underground channel, consumed him. It originally broadcast out of Oriente, hours from Camagüey, but the rebels had set up satellite stations. Daniel kept the volume low, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, but Dolores caught snippets as she toiled around the house. Rebels and resistance, Cuba awakening, the people joining the movement.
Maybe in the Sierra Maestra. In her town in Camagüey, things were quieter. Rural Camagüey’s news: that Carmen had slashed her finger with a scissor while cutting paper dolls out of newspaper, that Elena spilled black beans and rice all over the floor. Exhausted. Dolores feared what everyone feared—President Batista’s men coming in the night, knocking down their door. President Batista’s men with hands over her girls’ mouths, President Batista’s men demanding she dig her own grave. She knew the stories. She knew how fast an entire family disappeared in the night, dissipated like vapor. She knew how easily someone could erase her, knew she barely existed at all.
But to reason with Daniel. She’d whispered her concerns one night as they lay in bed and thick rain lulled them to false calm. How quick he had knocked her to the floor, s
aid she probably wanted to open her legs for Batista, slashed the belt across her face so that a welt formed diagonally from the bottom of her left lip to her right eyebrow. She feared her husband more than any president or his men.
The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, the guerrillero Fidel Castro made a plea from the mountains: Come with your rifles, your machetes, it’s time. That’s all it took. Daniel grabbed his straw hat and the blade he used to cut cane on his patrón’s farm. Dolores didn’t know how long he’d be gone or if he’d live. Just a few days of missed work meant she would have to feed the girls whatever was ripe on their little plot—some boiled plantains or malanga or, worse, a handful of nísperos, glasses of sugar water.
The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, Dolores watched him leave down the dirt road behind their house. He hitched a ride, waved back once. Elena slept in Dolores’s arms. Carmen grabbed her hand and yelled. She asked where her father was off to, work? Dolores lied and said he was visiting family. Carmen demanded to know when he’d be back. Daniel wore the same clothes he wore each day he worked the fields, left the same way he left each morning. But somehow Carmen sensed a different current to today’s departure. Perhaps Dolores too eager to wave goodbye.
She told Carmen she could miss school that day. The girl quieted.
And, aside from no money for food, how nice to have the house to themselves. Dolores swept and dusted, mended Carmen’s school clothes, knocked down ripe bananas with a wooden plank.
Later, they took a bus to the capital of the province. Carmen stood on the vinyl seat, nose glued to the window, and Elena wailed in Dolores’s arms before collapsing into sleep. At the plaza, Dolores let the girls run free, Carmen dangling over the edge of the fountain, wiggling ripples into the water, Elena toddling at Dolores’s feet. Dolores had no plan, no reason to be in the city. The best kind of feeling, to do something for no reason. She wanted to scream, wanted to dangle over the fountain like her daughter, force miniature waves with her fists.
That day was a Tuesday, a workday, and she watched bankers and shop owners wander through the plaza, watched the society women with their fancy prams and stockinged children, their nannies trailing behind. She knew her children looked feral in comparison—dirty and darker and poor. But she didn’t care. Bolero, mambo, son: she could dance if she wanted. Through the alleys, between market vendors, in the parks, at every stoplight. As she used to do with Daniel before the children. At the huge church that anchored the plaza, two bells rang to announce the hour while on the steps a woman begged for change.
“Why is that woman sitting like that?” Carmen asked. She had run to the bench where Dolores sat. She caught her breath with a dramatic gulp.
“Children don’t ask questions,” Dolores said. “Don’t leave your sister behind.”
Elena sat on the concrete at the foot of the fountain, watching the women who click-clacked past in bell-shaped skirts and cat-eye glasses, a chicness that immediately separated the plaza women from campo women like Dolores who, no matter how much they washed, always wore a sheen and scent of dust and earth.
Dolores stayed until sunset, stayed until her stomach grumbled and the girls began to whine and cry. She paid the last few cents she had left besides bus fare for cucuruchos de maní from the plaza vendor, which quieted the girls long enough for the ride home.
Was she disappointed when Daniel found his way back three days later? Truthfully, yes. They were hungry. She’d desperately looked for work but every person she approached turned her away. Nobody wanted a two-year-old on their farm or in their factory, and with all four grandparents dead, she had no one to watch Elena.
But she had also never watched the hours unfold as when Daniel was gone, time offering up its bounty like the yuca she dug from the ground. Dolores did as she wanted. Dolores visited neighborhood women and crocheted on their porches, took long walks with her girls and ate plump guavas straight from the bush. Dolores forgot to check the time, had no need to ready anything for anyone at any specific moment, just the food they’d eat. She even listened to the radio—her radio now—and danced to Beny Moré and Bola de Nieve as she swept.
Daniel arrived grizzled, dirty, in borrowed fatigues too big for his frame. “I’m so hungry,” he said as he walked through the door.
Carmen cried out, ran to his side.
“There’s nothing,” Dolores said. “I had no money for the market.” Dolores readied herself for a reaction, but Daniel only stared and slumped into a chair.
“Two days ago,” he said, “I killed a man.”
“Not in front of the children,” was all Dolores said. She knew Daniel didn’t offer conversation as an invitation. He said what he wanted to say, and she listened. In that way, Dolores did as she cautioned her children to do.
Did she wish, some nights later, that events had reversed? Daniel killed by the military approaching from behind, undetected, deep in the Sierra? Did she wish never to know what happened to her husband, to say, He disappeared into the mountains one day and I never saw him again—he is a martyr? Not all nights.
Only the nights when Daniel came home rum-drenched, cursing the Yankee imperialists who paid him pennies while they cavorted with go-go girls in private clubs, when he dropped pesos, barely enough for milk, much less meat, into Dolores’s hand.
The blows came fast—to the face, the stomach, Dolores’s back. He’d lock the girls in their room. Carmen was old enough to hear her father’s yelling, her mother’s crying, but she stayed silent behind that door. Though Daniel had never touched the girls, they feared him, too, with a confused admiration that Dolores had possessed for her own violent father.
After the blows came kicks sometimes. With mud-caked boots. Drawing blood from a broken nose that never repaired right, from split lips and knocked-out teeth. She should have feared death but she didn’t. In the moments when Daniel appeared ready to kill her, all thought ceased, and she retracted into the shell of her arms, saw splinters of light, spinning walls, felt like a child on a merry-go-round thrust off and ready to hit the floor. Sometimes, at the crescent of raw fear, she felt free, like she soared. The pain came later.
Some men apologized afterward. She had enough friends with husbands who “got a little out of hand sometimes,” too, to know as much. Some men bought gifts and promised change. Daniel spared her that confusion, at least. Hours later, days later, in his sobriety, Daniel would say nothing of his violence. He’d ignore the bruises or the cuts, the bandages and homemade splints because they couldn’t afford a doctor. He’d pat his girls on the head and bring them wildflowers that he hid in his pockets. If there was any conversation, it was about the news on the radio. Freedom is coming, he would say. Inevitable. He didn’t mention a return to the mountains, though Dolores willed it those nights, willed it so hard.
But Daniel didn’t mention joining the fight again. He still crouched with his ear to the radio each night. He still looked out each morning toward the field before him as if the Movement would come marching through darkness right to his door. But he had settled back into work and Dolores had settled back into her previous routine. Perhaps it had all been a phase, Daniel the hero.
His absence, though, had given Dolores ideas. She knew that it was no longer preposterous that a woman might leave her husband. There was even a woman, just a few miles away—a woman with two kids and no husband. The woman lived with her mother, sister, and sister’s husband. And sure, people whispered about her, and some families didn’t even want their kids mingling with hers, but the woman managed. She showed her face at the market and at school to pick up her children. She held birthday parties and invited Carmen.
Dolores knew, too, that once Carmen got older and Elena started school, she could leave the older girl in charge of the younger one and find work more easily. Maybe it was a matter of biding her time. She began to prepare. She hid little bits of her grocery allowance in a slit she cut under the mattress. She loosened a sl
at of wood from a wall and hid her most valuable possession there—an original printing of Les Misérables given to her by her grandmother Cecilia when she was a child. She started teaching Carmen how to cook simple dishes and put her in charge of little chores like dusting the furniture. And she befriended a neighborhood woman who owned a typewriter. She joined her every few days for coffee and to practice memorizing the keystrokes. The woman thought her simply curious and didn’t mind showing off her prize possession. Dolores joined the woman’s circle of friends who met each day at noon.
Daniel seemed to notice the change. Perhaps she lowered her head a little less or spoke a little more. Whatever it was, the new Dolores sharpened Daniel’s wrath. A month after killing a man for the first time, Daniel broke three of Dolores’s ribs and they had to borrow money to get Dolores to a hospital. She spent weeks in a rigid cast, and Carmen picked up more household chores.
By then, it was no longer just Daniel with his ear to the radio, whispering that, yes, an ouster of Batista might be possible. Dolores heard it even from the neighborhood women. Voices lowered, everyone leaning in, talk over coffee.
“—students in the capital who stormed the presidential palace.”
“—five guerrilleros. Just boys, still baby-faced. Lined up against a wall and shot in the head one by one—”
Typewriter click.
“I heard the americanos pledged to help Batista.”
“Can you imagine? I hear it’s just handfuls of peasants in the mountains, and the troops are losing!”
A ding. Hit return.
“You know what that means. Batista will crack down. On everybody.”
Nervous energy in the air. An uncertainty.
It’s not that Dolores didn’t want to see the President gone. But she had thought Daniel brash to run off to the mountains and feared every day that squads would come in the night, would shoot the whole family, dump their bodies in a hidden grave, burn their house, rape her girls. She feared Daniel joining the rebellion not because she disagreed with it in principle but because she had stopped believing any kind of change was possible. She wanted to live. And, even more important, wanted Carmen and Elena to live.
Of Women and Salt Page 14
