Cuba Diaries (45 page)

We tell him that it is very nice of him to say this, but what is he trying to say? Roberto says he knows that we have advantages, privileges, but that we try to do what we can to help people. We help people, and we try to see only what is good in people. That is why it pains him when some Cubans try to exploit the situation . . .

We ask him if he is trying to say something about Nelson Figueroa.

Roberto says Nelson Figueroa is very talked-about in the town as a big drunk. He has the habit of taking his clothes off in public and getting up on tables when he is drunk. Roberto says Nelson said to him the night before, when Roberto was driving him home, that they should use our car to cruise bars and pick up women.

“But where are the bars that you can cruise to? People don't even have
boniatos
(sweet potatoes) here; where are they going to get beers?”

“
Señora
, he wanted to use
your car
. . .” Roberto says Nelson asked him if he thought we would give him some money for going around with us. And the Dutch woman? Roberto says Nelson told him she is some old woman in her fifties who is in Baracoa, hanging out, and Nelson is sleeping with her in exchange for being maintained. Roberto says Nelson told him, “
Me cuesta mucho trabajo
” (“It's really a lot of work”).

I HAVE TOLD NICK
to steel himself, but the Gran Hotel Camagüey, we discover, is now managed by a Spanish chain. The bronze girl still holds her globe lamp at the bottom of the stairs, but the rooms on floors that are open to guests now have hot and cold running water.

Nick and I lie in twin beds while I tell him about how Marianne and I lay there, waiting for running water, our armpits smoking.

The top-floor breakfast room, lifted directly from a William Holden movie, has not changed, however, and it still takes more than an hour to get fried eggs.

The bank and Bienes Culturales come today. The bank is represented by the same two men who came and listed all the jewelry and silver we brought with us when we moved in. They come with the list they made that day. They also bring with them a man from Customs, who introduces himself as Nestor. Nestor is a smiling
blanquito
with curly black hair and large dark eyes. They sit at the dining room table, checking the list of silver and jewelry we brought into the country against the silver and jewelry we are bringing out, and adding the new pieces of silver we have bought here, which we have already gotten stickers for, after paying 10 percent of their declared value, from the government export-licensing entity in the state antique store in the Hotel Kohly.

All antiques, silver, and jewelry, no matter where you buy them (and strangely, they don't seem to be much concerned about
where
you buy something), must be taken to the Kohly for export licenses. All paintings must be taken to the export office of Bienes Culturales for export licenses, and all books more than fifty years old must be taken to the Biblioteca Nacional. With the export licenses come little stickers, which are placed on
each item. The silver items and jewelry are checked again, before the movers come, by representatives of the bank and one Customs representative, the other items are checked by Bienes Culturales, and then everything is checked again by Customs when the movers are actually in the house and the packing is going on.

We can't find a piece of silver that we brought into the country and is on the bank's list. We think it must still be in the attic. Miguel, Danila, and I climb to the attic and kick papers and shift mattresses and rip open boxes. Miguel and Danila keep looking, and I start back downstairs. I meet the two bank people and Nestor coming up the stairs as I go down. I have not told them they could come upstairs; they are just heading on up. Standing in front of them on the stairs, I tell them that the piece of silver we are looking for will be down shortly, ask them what they would like to drink, and escort them back down the stairs to the dining room.

To gain time as Concha is serving drinks, I ask her if she is sure she has brought out of the pantry all the silver belonging to us that we will be taking out of the country. I go back into the pantry with her and rattle trays. I pull out some ladles and a soup tureen and take them into the dining room. “We forgot these!” I say, sounding alarmed.

“It's silver plate. It doesn't count,” the older bank person says. Just then Miguel and Danila come into the dining room carrying the lost silver piece.

Bienes Culturales, which comes an hour and a half after the arrival of the bank, is Maida, a modified boarding-school-housemother type in a plaid polyester skirt with a frayed hem. With her is Betina, the bouncy woman who was present three years earlier as our things were being unpacked—on the lookout for Cuban national treasures coming from Southeast Asia—and had handed us her card. Recognizing the name Maida and noticing the whiff of gentility about her, I ask Maida if she knows Nicoletta.

“We were at the conservatory together,” Maida says.

Maida is one of the childhood friends of Nicoletta's who stayed on, whom Nicoletta looked up when she came back to Cuba. They hadn't seen each other for forty years.

“She has a pitiful job,” Nicoletta said, describing Maida to me, “going into foreigners' houses, checking what they are taking out of the country. ‘But how can you
do
that,' I said to her, ‘checking the things that Cubans are forced to sell in order to survive. Going into foreigners' houses, checking every little thing, saying yes, no, yes, no. A Chartrand (nineteenth-century Cuban
landscape painter) or a Pelaez (twentieth-century Cuban painter) painting, I can understand, but every little thing. You were such a talented girl at the conservatory. You can't possibly
believe
in what you are doing, now that you have seen how it has turned out . . .'”

I take Maida and Betina to the section of the upstairs hall where I have put the clocks, vases, ashtrays, door knockers, paintings, daguerreotype, furniture, china, opera glasses, mantilla combs, fans, glassware, pharmaceutical jars, and books more than fifty years old bought in Cuba that we are taking out of the country—the valuable objects with their stickers from the Hotel Kohly, the books with stickers from the Biblioteca Nacional.

Maida tells me we have to have export licenses for the ashtrays and less-valuable items as well. The less-valuable items are grouped in lots of five, on which we must pay an export tax of ten dollars per lot. Maida measures and describes every one of our forty biomorphic Murano ashtrays, measuring the distances between swoop points or bulges, and calling the measurements to Betina, who writes them down.

I point out the piano in the playroom.

“
Problema
,” Maida says about the piano.

It is one-thirty. Concha comes upstairs. “The bank people are still downstairs,” she whispers.

“But I thought they finished . . .”

“I thought so, too. But they are just hanging around in the dining room.”

I seat the bank people, Nestor, and the Bienes Culturales women on the porch and give them
empanada de atun
(tuna cooked with peppers and onions in a piecrust), beer, salad, and ice cream; the table is set with doilies and cloth napkins. Concha waits on them, looking peeved.

Nestor shakes my hand, grinning, as he leaves. “Be sure to ask for Nestor when you move.”

Maida says we can export everything except the piano, the pharmaceutical jars, the daguerreotype, and two door knockers in the form of ladies' hands.

I knew the piano and the pharmaceutical jars would be a problem and I suspected the daguerreotype would be, but I had no idea about the door knockers. Still, I act surprised about everything. “A Chartrand or a Pelaez painting, I can understand . . .”

Maida looks at me, startled. Then slowly, with her eyes half shut, she explains in a quiet voice that it is forbidden to export pianos or anything that reflects
cubanidad
.

“
Cubanidad?
”

“Anything that is symbolic of Cuban history.”

Maida says she will ask her superior.

Nick says he will write to Bienes Culturales.

I get a chorus of reproofs afterward from Lorena, Concha, Manuel, Miguel, Estrella, and Danila that
I should have served them in the kitchen, with paper napkins
.

Smiling Nestor comes the day the actual packing begins with another Customs guy, an unsmiling six-foot-eight-inch
negro azul y trompudo
whose muscles strain the seams of his uniform and whose pants stop a good eight inches above his ankles. We didn't know Nestor would be coming with someone else. I explain to them and the packers that they can do downstairs first, then move upstairs.

I am not so worried about the two painted fifties side tables we have downstairs that we forgot to get an export license for as I am about another small table I forgot. It is caoba—Cuban mahogany. Some say they don't let you take out caoba furniture at all, but others say that if the piece is minor enough, you can take it out. Still, every piece of caoba furniture has to be considered by Bienes Culturales, and I am afraid that if we ask about it at this late date, they will just say no and we will have no time to appeal. I detach the tabletop from the base to make the top look like a tray and the base like nothing and put the screw in my pocket. I put them and the painted tables in the “stuff we've always had” section.

Nestor stamps every juncture of strapping tape with a small stamp from Customs as the boxes are finished. Nestor is very talkative and asks questions about words and expressions in English and X——ian as he stamps. The
negro azul y trompudo
watches in stooped silence. I wonder if it is a good cop/bad cop routine or if Nestor's joviality is meant to give me a false sense of ease, and the seriousness of the
negro azul y trompudo
is meant to give me I don't know what. My heart races and there is a sweaty feeling in my palms as the packers move closer to the caoba table. There are lulls between stamping sessions, though, and after a while Nestor's attention and the attention of the
negro azul y trompudo
fall on the old copies of
El Nuevo Herald
(the Spanish-language version of the
Miami Herald), Herald-Tribune
, the
Economist, Hola
(a Spanish gossip magazine), and other magazines and newspapers that are being used for packing. Nestor and the
negro azul y trompudo
sit
on the floor, carefully smoothing rumpled newspapers and magazines, so absorbed in their reading that the packers, when they finish a parcel, have to yell, “Stamp!”

They seem casual, but the caoba table, when they get to it, will trip an alarm that will cause them to go scuttering through the house, picking up on details that we didn't think were criminal, but turn out to be criminal.

THE
NEGRO AZUL Y TROMPUDO
is replaced today by a slender young
blanquito
, who is also silent and spends most of his time reading
Hola
and drinking Tropicolas.

ON THE THIRD DAY
, the small table and base are packed in a box with such insouciance that I slip the fat screw I have been holding in my pocket since the first day into the box right in front of everybody.

Nestor has yet another partner today, who like the others is silent and spends most of his time smoothing out crumpled magazines and newspapers and reading them while sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Nestor and the packers move upstairs. His partner lingers downstairs. All of the books we owned before coming to Cuba, as well as those we bought in Cuba that are less than fifty years old, are still on their shelves in the upstairs hall.

“You are aware that all books have to be checked by the
biblioteca?
” Nestor asks, walking right up to and removing a sixty-year-old book from the shelf that was somehow not taken to the
biblioteca
. Nestor slips it into a box of books that are being packed. The box is sealed. Nestor stamps it, winking at me.

Nestor moves to a table on which I have put small objects to be packed. There are many seashells, some of which are from Cuba, but most of which we have collected from other places in the world. “Do you know that it is illegal to remove seashells from the country?” Nestor says.

“But they are
ours!
” I say, truly surprised. I catch myself: “I mean, they are shells Nick found in Africa.”

Ours. It is all ours
. Still, Nick and I have taken to saying, “This is ours,” about what we brought with us into the country, and “This is from Cuba,” not “This is ours,” about the things we bought or found here,
even to each other
.

“Listen,” he says, “my
compañero
downstairs is from another division. Pack the seashells first.” Nestor motions to the packers to start packing the seashells now.

The
compañero
comes upstairs before the shells are completely packed. He gives the shells a desultory look and goes back to reading the weekly magazine supplement to
El País
.

SATURDAY. THE PACKERS
load the final container this morning. It is also the day of Jimmie's birthday party.

I pleaded with Jimmie to have the party on Sunday (“It will be calm then—Mommy won't be so tired”), but Jimmie said
kids never had birthday parties on Sunday it was his last birthday party ever in Cuba in his life and he should have it when he wanted to have it why did we have to leave he was mad about leaving it was nice in Cuba you got to wear shorts all the time it wasn't fair he had to go to a scary big school now
con
pale, pale, mean
blancos
and there were no mangoes and no swimming pools and no tarantulas in the grass and no tostones
.

It is also the day Thea wakes with a temperature of 104 degrees. She is not able to hold anything down. I call the pediatrician at 7:30
A.M
. I rummage through the remains of the medicine cabinet for fever-lowering suppositories. All we have are expired suppositories from when the children weighed less. Dr. Silvia is brought to the house by Miguel. Thea is put in a tub and sprayed with cold water—this as I am running out of the bathroom every few minutes to watch the loading of the container.