Queen of the Underworld (28 page)

“Speaking of words,” I said, “what does
‘barbudos’
mean? I missed out on a joke by that Don Waldo when he was checking in because it was the single word I didn’t know.”

“Yes, I remember. He said all he required was that their accommodations be free of
barbudos. ‘Barbudos’
means bearded.
‘Los barbudos’
has become the epithet, not always flattering, for Fidel’s revolutionaries. Though Fidel’s
barba
is rather
flaca.
Che Guevara has the most photogenic beard.”

“ What is
‘flaca’
?”

“Oh, thin, wispy. Not curly like Che’s. I’m sure Fidel envies Che’s beard and hates when they are photographed together. Fidel is much taller, however.”

“It’s a wonder anybody ever becomes bilingual,” I said morosely. How had I managed to drink three-fourths of my lager?

“Don’t worry, Emma. All those years you spent at St. Clothilde’s and now surrounded by so many of us at the Julia Tuttle, you’re ahead of the game.”

Where else had I heard that phrase recently? Ah, yes, Major Erna Marjac, assessing the bright and shining product in front of her, minus all the Earl shadows.

“¡Aquí están! Dos medianoches. Buen provecho, señorita, Alejito!”
With great flourish Victor presented our sinful sandwiches, still crackling from the grill and oozing bubbly cheese, and flanked by those sweet-smelling Cuban banana halves. “Careful,
señorita
Gant, that plate is very hot! Alejito?
¿Otra de lo mismo?
”

“Sí, Victor,”
said Alex, after checking the state of our glasses. His was half empty. “It seems we are thirsty tonight.”

“Now tell me,” I said to Alex, “who is Don Waldo and what is this book he smuggled over in his wife’s dress? I
thought
that billowy dress was an odd choice for traveling, it rustled like it had crinolines sewn into the skirt.”

“It was Altagracia’s wedding dress, which was permitted to be rustly and billowy, and the ‘crinolines’ were his long-awaited
memorias,
written in tiny script on both sides of note cards. Who is Don Waldo? Where to begin? He is listed in professional biographies as a Cuban essayist, critic, and educator, born in Madrid in 1882. I have a few of his
obras
in translation, which you are welcome to borrow. Who is Don Waldo to our family is more complex. He is my second cousin twice removed and became Lídia’s father-in-law briefly. Later he was her favorite professor at the University of Havana until the dictator General Machado closed it, and he has been her cherished mentor and correspondent for years, though she writes to him more often than he writes to her. I took Don Waldo’s Poets and Rebels Seminar during his visiting semester at Harvard and made an A-plus. Lídia, of course, took the credit when she found out about it later, but I wrote the best term paper of my life.”

“How could she take the credit?”

“Because Don Waldo belonged to her first, and because she knew Lorca and Jiménez—my term paper was about the influence of New York City on Martí, Lorca, and Jiménez. Martí alone escaped her clutches by dying before she was born. Otherwise it would have been, ‘My son Alejito is writing his paper on three of my good friends: José our great liberator, dear naughty Federico, and poor Juan Ramón.’ At Harvard, Don Waldo assumed I was simply Alex de Costa from Palm Beach, he didn’t connect me with the de Costas from Camagüey Province, not that Don Waldo would have reason to know any cattlemen. He had known my mother as Lídia Prieto Maldonado, and I wasn’t about to reveal myself as Lídia’s son, until the course was over. How is your
medianoche,
Emma?”

“Even better than last time. I’ve been trying to figure out why. It’s crisper and butter-ier on the outside, and the filling is nice and runny, yet the pork and cheese maintain their separate textures.”

“That’s the mark of Victor. He made them himself.”

“Good Lord, is the
cook
at Lídia’s party, too?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Look around you. Only a few
turistas
who wouldn’t know a good
medianoche
from a perfect one.”

“Do you really think your mother is starting a new
movimiento
?”

“Lídia adores having a new cause. She has the time and most decidedly she has the energy. And she rides into town with my grandfather’s and stepfather’s blessings and on their bank accounts. Fidel can’t bite the dust soon enough for Abuelito and Dick. His messy revolution is delaying their plans for that new hotel on the Malecón.”

“The one you’re going to manage?”

“
¿Quién sabe?
Today my crystal ball is
ess-TRRREME-ly
vague.” Alex’s savagely rolled
r
gave emphasis to his suddenly clouded-over face. He was feeling edged out by Lídia, displaced from his role as person in charge at the Julia Tuttle and manager-in-training for his grandfather’s future hotel in Havana. If I had been a better person, I would have rerouted the conversation back to his successful term paper, New York’s influence on Martí, Lorca, and Jiménez—Why was Lorca “naughty”? Why was Jiménez, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature only three years before, “poor”?—but my curiosity had its own system of priorities.

“How did Don Waldo happen to be Lídia’s father-in-law?”

“She eloped with his son, Jorge, when she was sixteen. Abuelito got it annulled and Jorge entered the Jesuits.”

“Now wait, was this the same Jesuit who taught Castro and became his friend and supporter?”

“You remember everything, Emma. Yes, that is Jorge, but Don Waldo was telling us tonight that Fidel is now beginning to turn a cold eye on all priests and nuns, even those who were his dear friends. Poor Don Waldo is going blind. His wife had to sign the register.”

T
HE POOLSIDE
party I walked away from three hours earlier had undergone changes of tempo, set, casting, and even lighting. The little orchestra Lídia had hired off the street was playing a slow, romantic dance tune. A singer had been found from somewhere and he was crooning a song many of the guests sang or nodded along with. I picked out the words
“dos gardenias,” “te quiero,” “te adoro,” “mi vida,” “corazón,” “calor,”
and
“beso”
—all of which suddenly recalled to me that my own
corazón,
Paul of the Roses, would be with me as soon as tomorrow. A few couples danced; the other guests chattered in Spanish around the wrought-iron tables that Wednesday’s tornado had sent shrieking across the concrete. Waiters (from where? La Bodega?) served drinks on trays.

But all this was background, the guests (who appeared to be a fresh batch) relegated to the role of extras hired to provide ambience for the center-stage pageant.

N
EAR THE
entrance to the pool, two floor lamps with fringed shades had been brought outside and hooked up to extension cords to illuminate the wondrous-strange proceedings. Within the twin circles of golden lamplight were gathered what first appeared to be three seamstresses bent over their work: Marisa Ocampo, her daughter Luisa, and the tall young mulatto woman who was Don Waldo Navarro’s bride. Flanking them and facing each other in matching wing chairs dragged out from the lobby were portly Don Waldo, cheerfully puffing a cigar, and Lídia, arranged like a compliant schoolgirl, ankles crossed demurely below the flounces of her red flamenco skirt, head modestly lowered, reading aloud the topmost note card from the stack in her lap.

“Cuando no puede vestirse de piel de león, vístase en la de vulpeja.”
When you cannot dress yourself in the something-or-other of the lion, dress in that of . . . Damn it, what was a
vulpeja
?

Appreciative nods and murmurs. A sweet little twitch of Luisa Ocampo’s mouth.

“Saber ceder al tiempo es exceder . . .”
To know blank of the time is to . . . what?
¡Mierda!
Poor show, Emma.

The voluminous taffeta traveling dress was spread across the laps of the three who were intently picking out its seams, squeezing out one after another the contraband note cards of Don Waldo’s memoirs, and handing them over to Lídia, who all of a sudden became aware of Alex and me observing their tableau from the sidelines.

“
Niños,
come and join us! Don Waldo, this is our young
periodista
I was telling you about, Emma Gant, who writes for the
Miami Star.
Emma,
querida,
may I present my dear cousin and mentor, Don Waldo Navarro, one of our great men of letters.”

Gripping the arms of the wing chair, Don Waldo with a rolling motion of his rotund belly was making ready to rise.

“Oh, please don’t get up,” I said.

But already he had nimbly sprung himself to full towering height. “Why not?” demanded the jovial sepulchral voice. “I am still a vertical animal.”

He laughed and grasped my hand in both of his, as Hector Rodriguez had done earlier. A Cuban masculine thing?

“Encantado, señorita Gant.”

Though Alex had said Don Waldo was almost blind, the old man appeared to be taking me in with the full advantage of twenty-twenty vision in its prime.

“They tell me you have been working late at the paper,
señorita.
”

“Yes, a good friend just died. I wrote her obituary.”

“Ah, I doubt I shall have such good fortune.”

“Sir?”

“I mean that a good friend will write my
necrología.
It is especially unlikely in Cuba now. Certainly not in
Granma.
”

Delighted laughter from his adoring circle, except for his wife Altagracia, who simply kept on picking out stitches from her amazing traveling dress. Perhaps she knew little or no English.

“The official newspaper of the Revolution,” Don Waldo explained to me. “
Granma
was the name of Castro’s sailing vessel in his botched attempt to bring down Batista in 1956.”

“Alejandro!” Lídia called sharply just as Alex was edging away.
“Una silla
for Emma,
por favor.”

Alex turned on his heel.
“En seguida, Doña Lídia,”
he replied dryly, executing a curt bow.

“And—and bring a chair for yourself, too, of course,” Lídia called after him, a mollifier he gave no sign of having heard.

“Tell me,
señorita
Gant, how do you find living among this hotbed of exiles?”

“It has given me a taste of being an exile myself.”

“
¿De verdad?
I am curious to hear more.”

“Language, for a start. I guess it’s mostly about language.”

“Please continue!”

“Well, here I am among people who speak a language I have studied in school and still I can understand only about one word in every five, if that. But the situation could be much worse. What if the Julia Tuttle were a hotel filling up with Polish exiles or . . . or
Swahili
exiles?”

“Then both of us would be in trouble,” remarked Don Waldo, with his basso profundo laugh. “But please, go on!”

“And then, looking at it from the other side,” I continued, aware that I had captured his interest, “these people . . . I don’t mean like yourself or . . . or Marisa Ocampo, who went to an American school . . . but many of the people here find themselves having to start all over with little or no English. And it’s demeaning. You lose your
graces.
Being bereft of your native language even affects your posture.” (I was thinking of the gesturings that accompanied the Spanglish hash of handsome Enrique Ocampo, whom Alex and I had just glimpsed hunched at the switchboard, waving his hands wildly in an attempt to make himself understood to the party on the other end of the line.)

“A very perceptive observation,
señorita
Gant.”

“I wish you would call me Emma, Don Waldo.”

“With pleasure . . . Emma. One of my favorite heroines. We are on our way to Princeton, where I will deliver a lecture titled ‘The Journey from Delusion to Reality in the Novels of Jane Austen.’ With particular emphasis on
Emma,
and, to a lesser degree,
Pride and Prejudice.
”

Don Waldo’s fluent British English was lavishly colored with Spanish intonations, and his Spanish
s
’s and
z
’s thick with the
castellano
lisp. “Providential for Altagracia and me, the Princeton engagement was confirmed eighteen months ago. It afforded us the perfect opportunity to vamoose.

“ ‘You are traveling light,
compañeros,
’ they said while pawing through our things at José Martí Airport today.

“ ‘
Ah, sí, compañeros,
only these lecture notes on Regency literature you have examined from my briefcase, a change of shirts, an extra pair of eyeglasses, a change of outfit for my wife—
pasamos la luna de miel,
we are making a short honeymoon out of my lecture obligation before we return home.’

“ ‘Ah, felicidades, compañeros. Buen viaje. ¡Hasta pronto! ¡Viva la Revolución!’

“ ‘¡Viva la Revolución, compañeros—hasta pronto!’ ”
Don Waldo lowered his voice to a throaty whisper. “
¡Pero no aguantes la respiración, compañeros!
Or as we say in English, don’t hold your breath! Then, very calmly, with deliberation, I replaced the lecture notes into their little hammock where they ride in my
portafolio,
I closed it with a smart click-
click,
and then, very calmly and with majesty, Altagracia took my arm and she and her whispering skirts swept us through the last barrier into the departure lounge, which we call
la pecera,
the fishbowl, because it is enclosed by glass.”

“And nobody suspected the whispering skirts?”

“
Por Dios,
nobody. Again providential that susurrating skirts are in fashion.”

I was racking my brain for a half-remembered line of poetry,
the susurration of the pines,
something like that—Poe? Whitman? Milton?—to keep up my end in response to Don Waldo’s agile parlance, when Enrique Ocampo brought out “my” chair. He was placing it according to Lídia’s instructions—next to her, not to the great man of letters—when the musicians struck up a jaunty little number that elicited a roar of joy from Don Waldo.