Cuba Diaries (11 page)

“That has no advertisement with it. It is not part of the series. It is not considered . . . ironic, though some may consider it ironic . . .”

Just as I have forgotten about the pig's head, I open the door of the most broken-down of our three refrigerators, a compact Minsk without shelves and with the internal freezer-compartment door broken off, so that everything in it stays only semifrozen.

There, on the floor of the Minsk, long-lashed eyes closed serenely, frost swirling around it, as if on some glacial altar, is our own little Lord of the Flies.

Carlita is from Bayamo, which is on the other end of the island, near Santiago, but her mother's cousin, Davide, lives in Havana. Carlita stays with Davide on her days off and on the weekends. Carlita would like Nick and me to meet him. Carlita is, in fact, determined for us to meet Davide, though she won't explain why. She has been trying to get us to come to Davide's house for several weeks, but Nick has been busy.

Davide is a retired architect. He designed hotels before
el triunfo de la revolución
, he even designed a hotel for Lucky Luciano, but then he became a revolutionary. He went back to working as an architect after
el triunfo
, but he designed more modest buildings then.

Davide, who is in his sixties, and his girlfriend, who is in her thirties, live in Miramar in a small house he designed for himself. It is a square brick house with louvers for windows. The bedrooms are in the basement, for coolness, he says.

Davide is slim and well groomed, with a boyish face, and seems at once pleased and appalled to see us.

We sit on Danish modern sofas in the living room. Macramé plant holders hang in front of every window, and on the windowsills are blown-glass bottles holding sand in brightly colored layers, urchin figurines with humorous signs on them, and a terra-cotta Mexican donkey with tiny cacti growing out of a small planter on its back. A guitar leans in one corner. Paintings of Cuban landscapes are interspersed with paintings of clowns and paintings on velvet of bare-breasted Polynesian girls.

Carlita sits on the edge of one Danish modern sofa, looking back and forth, from Davide to us.

Nick asks Davide if he knows of any good
paladares
.

“
Paladares?
” Davide says, looking uncomfortable.

I had the feeling when I first walked into Davide's house—and now I know it for sure—that Davide is sitting in a room with card-carrying capitalists for the first time since 1962. I have not had this feeling meeting other Cubans, but I do have it with Davide.

Davide says he doesn't know of any
paladares
. . .

I ask Davide quickly if he would like us to bring him back anything from Europe or the United States.

“Architectural magazines,” Davide says emphatically, looking relieved. “Anything about architecture . . .”

I tell Nick after we get outside that he shouldn't ask people like that about
paladares
.

“People like what?”

“
Nick
.”

I don't know whether it's my being a woman or my not being X——ian, or whether it's just that marriages must have their little surprises every day, for on another day, it would have been Nick sensing the vibes and me saying the wrong thing.

The children and I will be leaving soon for the summer (Nick will join us when he can), but we still have a few weekends left.

There is a median strip on the Prado, which is in places still paved with smooth terrazzo. It is ideal for in-line skating. We have seen children—Cuban children—on Rollerblades there already. The Prado is a copy of the famous promenade, Las Ramblas, in Barcelona.

We park the car at the beginning of the Prado near the Malecón. The children seat themselves on a stone bench and put on Rollerblades. They have knee pads on, too, and wrist guards. They start to skate. We walk behind them. Jimmie skates briskly, but Thea skates listlessly. Old people sitting on the stone benches that are still intact, and children climbing on the remains of lampposts and stone lions, stare at us as we pass. We see a few other children with Rollerblades on, but none with wrist guards or knee pads. Our children's clothes are not exceptional, just shorts and T-shirts, but they look extraordinarily pressed and gleaming, compared with the other children's clothes; and with the wrist guards and knee pads, our children looked pressed, gleaming, and science fictional. Our clothes are not exceptional either, just jeans and T-shirts, but they look gleaming, too, and together as a family we are huge and gleaming and all but carrying a big sign that says
LOOK AT US
. Jimmie skates ahead; Thea skates more and more slowly, her shoulders ever more hunched. “
Dáme un chicle
,” (“Give me some chewing gum,”) a boy Thea age's says to Thea. Thea speeds up past him, then flops down on a bench beyond him. I bring my face close to hers. “I want to go home,” she mumbles. She starts to cry.

We hear honking. A crowd gathers at one side of the median strip, across from an ornate building. It is the Palacio de Matrimonios and it is Saturday
afternoon. No one is looking at us anymore, for a two-tone Ford Galaxie convertible has rolled up to the
palacio
, with a woman in a wedding dress seated up on top of the backseat. Ladas and motorcycles with sidecars bearing wedding guests pull up behind her. “
Viva la esposa!
” the crowd shouts. The bride, white-tuxedo-clad groom, and wedding guests enter the
palacio
. They emerge a few minutes later, and the bride and groom take off in the Ford Galaxie under a handful of confetti, the guests after them, honking and shouting.

It's one convertible and one wedding party after another after that, every ten to fifteen minutes. Thea stands in her socks on a stone lion with Jimmie, holding on to our shoulders for balance. Nick and I hold their Rollerblades tightly in our arms. “I still want to go home,” Thea says after the second wedding group has left, but we manage to watch through a third group, then go home.

I am packing my bag.

Nick comes in. “I know now how to tell real cigars from fake cigars,” Nick tells me, ripping the wrapping off a box of cigars he has bought from the repairman's brother-in-law's uncle's second wife's present husband. “If it's real, it bends but doesn't break.”

He bends a cigar. It breaks immediately, dry cigar flakes showering his hands.

“Pig penis,” Nick says in X——ian, crushing the cigar to pieces and throwing the box against the wall.

The first thing Nick wants to do after I get back with the children from summer vacation is to take me to a good
paladar
and introduce me to some interesting people he has met over the summer: Natalia Bolivar and Reynaldo González.

Natalia Bolivar is an anthropologist, an expert on Santeria. Nick had Natalia over a couple of times during the summer. She sat with him on the veranda, drinking
mojitos
and talking about the old days. She is from a wealthy, conservative background and she told Nick her mother used to call the police, just as a matter of course, whenever she saw an unknown black person walking on the street in front of their house. As a teenager, Natalia became a revolutionary. She had used a machine gun and been arrested and tortured by Batista.

Reynaldo is the director of the Cuban Film Archives. In the evenings, he and his boyfriend, Eddie, run the
paladar
we are going to. It is the best
paladar
Nick has been to so far.

Reynaldo greets us as we enter. He is of average height, balding, with a cast to one eye. Eddie, much younger than he and with a very sweet face, does the cooking. Reynaldo is said to be the model for the gay guy in
Strawberry and Chocolate
.

There is an
apagón
(blackout) when we get there, so we spend most of the evening with candles. Natalia is in her late fifties or early sixties, statuesque, with white hair pinned up in a casual chignon and a mass of necklaces around her throat, most of them descending halfway down her chest. They shine dully in the candlelight. They are made of shells, beads (presumably in the colors of her chosen
orishas
, or Afro-Cuban Santeria gods), metal, and stone, and of other materials that I cannot identify in the semidarkness. I ask
a question about them, but Natalia answers me rapidly, speaking with a heavy Cuban accent. I cannot understand anything she is saying, but I don't want to slow down the conversation by asking her to repeat what she has just said. I am having a hard time understanding Reynaldo and Eddie, too. Nick, though, can understand everything, it seems: he's making comments in all the right places. He's made a lot of progress in Spanish and
cubano
over the summer, while my Spanish has deteriorated and my
cubano
has deteriorated even more.

I ask Nick later what they were talking about, and he tells me he didn't understand. He didn't understand a thing; he just liked them, that's all.

I bring architectural magazines from the United States for Davide. We sit on the Danish modern sofas in his living room while he leafs through them eagerly. “
Mira eso, qué interesante, gracias
,” Davide says. He leafs through page after page, slapping the back of his hand down on images he likes. He pauses on some photographs of a spare clapboard neoclassical American house with a wide veranda painted pale blue and white. “I
love
this,” he says, holding the image up for me hurriedly. “Look, so plain. You don't
need
a lot of . . .” He looks at the magazine. A large American flag is hanging down from one of the beams of the veranda. It's the Fourth of July edition. He doesn't finish his sentence and turns the page.

“I have a
paladar
for you,” he says conspiratorially. He scribbles the name down on a piece of paper.

Dance classes have ended at the community center. The community center is closing. The building is going to be made into offices for a foreign company, the
directora
tells us. There is not going to be a community center anymore in Siboney.

Thea beams.

The
directora
tells us the teacher will be giving classes in her apartment on Primera Avenida. We will have to pay for them, three dollars a time.

Thea looks at me, stricken.

I tell her to try them, just try them at the new place, for three times. If she doesn't like the classes after three times, if she
really
doesn't like them, she is not going to have to take dance anymore.

“I itch, Mommy,” Thea says.

I take Thea into Nick's study, shine the desk light on her bare chest. Red blotches cover her chest, back, neck, and stomach. I pull down her pants. They cover her crotch, behind, and upper legs. They are not
agua mala
, for it is not the season, and besides, the blotches are flat and wide, not raised. “They really
bother me
,” Thea says, crying.

I cover Thea in calamine lotion. The outer reaches of a hurricane are passing by outside, and the phone works only intermittently. Not long after our arrival in Cuba, someone had thrust the name of a pediatrician at me. I'm kicking myself now for not having made a courtesy call on the pediatrician the last school year, just to get acquainted. I don't know why I think this would have made it easier for me to get through to her on the telephone.

I spend the night with Thea on a towel-covered mattress, reapplying calamine lotion. I finally reach the pediatrician after twelve hours of calling her neighbor on our cellular phone and leaving message after message. José drives to pick her up. Thea stays home from school. The doctor arrives, a tall, thin, smiling woman with black hair. Dr. Silvia.

THE PEDIATRIC ALLEGRY CENTER
is in the Vedado section. It was somebody's house, reduced now to brown rooms (you can't make out in the dim light whether they are painted brown or darkened by time) and snaking corridors lit by flickering fluorescent lights.

We get in a line of about ten seven- and eight-year-old boys and girls and their mothers. Dr. Silvia stands beside us. The center is for Cubans only, Dr. Silvia explains sotto voce to me in broken English so that the others in line can't understand. There are hospitals for foreigners to go to, but you have to pay, and it's ridiculous to pay fifty, sixty dollars, she says, for exactly the same service you get here. It's maybe even better here because the doctor we are going to see, Dr. Yamila Lawton, is
the
specialist in Cuba for pediatric allergies. She was Dr. Silvia's professor and she won't see foreigners in the center, but she is Dr. Silvia's friend, and Dr. Silvia called her and asked her to see us, just this once. Then afterward, if I want, I can give Dr. Yamila a little present—not money, but a little present. I can send it to her through Dr. Silvia. Food, some clothes maybe. Just a little thing. Foreigners pay in the foreigners' clinics, but the doctors who work there don't get any of it; the doctors still get their same three hundred pesos a month (about eleven dollars) no matter where they work. “The rest of the money,” Dr. Silvia says, whispering very close to my ear and making the beard sign, “goes you-know-where.”

The door opens. “Next,” a nurse calls.

Dr. Silvia walks in first, talking rapidly in Cuban. Dr. Yamila Lawton, a small woman in her fifties with eyes magnified behind her glasses, sits on a stool in a tiny room with one weak overhead lightbulb. She is flanked by two younger doctors. She tells Thea to take off her clothes. The blotches are subsiding but still visible.

“Could be strawberries, could be chocolate, shellfish, milk, wheat, egg whites, dogs, grass . . . Try this.” Dr. Yamila Lawton scribbles a prescription on a piece of paper. “If it doesn't work, come back and see me.”