Jubana! (31 page)

 

“I am no longer affianced,” I announced to the 'rents. Mami was already in bed by the time I got home. Big pink cabbage roses engulfed her in a down comforter. Papi was half asleep in the rocker, wearing his striped pajamas, silk bathrobe, and soft worn leather slippers. A movie played in the dark.

“¿Qué?”
Mami said absentmindedly.

“What are you watching?” I said, climbing up on the bed and turning on her reading lamp.

“Moonstroke,”
Mami said. “Ees my favoreet.
La familia!
Dat Chair cracks me up.”

“SHARE,” I said. “Her name is pronounced SHARE.”

“Right,” Mami said. “Chair. Das what I johs said.”

“SHARE.”

“Den why ees eet spell-ed weeth a C-H?”

“I think Paul and I just broke off,” I said.

“Again?” Mami said, not looking up. “Please. Das so redohndan'.”

“I know,” I said. “But we looked at rings in Tiffany yesterday and we went to see Bruce today and then he totally freaked out. We barely talked to each other on the ride to the train.”

“Se le va a pasar,”
Papi said.
“El tipo 'sta nervioso, coño. Eso 's normal. Dale un chance.”
He'll get over it. The guy is nervous, dammit. That's normal. Give him a chance.

“I'm
tryeengh
to watch CHAIR,” Mami said, pressing the up volume button on the remote.

As the Brooklyn snow falls down on Ronny (Nicholas Cage) and Loretta (Chair), Ronny tells her, “Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is…Love don't make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!”

“Dat ees so fabulohs!” Mami said, reaching for her Kools. “I lohvee!”

When the movie ended and Papi began snoring, Mami turned off the TV set.

“Okay, so let me get dees straight,” she said, turning to me. “Paul jus' ruin-ed our lives?”

“Yes.”

“Mumita,”
Mami said, gathering me in her arms. She smelled like Bill Blass perfume.
“Mi pobrecita!”

“I know. I feel like shit.”

“Don',” Mami said. “Be pees-ed off eenstead! He was goheengh to be joor husband! One meeneet hees goheengh eento Teefany an' de nex' hees leaveengh Teefany, like, Oopsie, I was johs keedeengh! Wha's weeth heem?”

“I'm trying to sleep,
coño,
” Papi grumbled.

“Paul was goheengh along weeth a dream,” Mami continued, ignoring Papi. “A fantasy. An' den, ders notheengh der! Ees like a balloon, one preek, all gone! Joov been through a lot of ohps and downers weeth heem. An' de fact dat joo went to see de rabbi ees very poignan'. Joo went der to talk about marri-age, not to go to sehrveeses!”

“Just kill me now,” I said.

“I theenk Paul does lohv joo, doh,” Mami said, putting out her Kool and sipping her Diet Coke with Lime through a straw. “Dees has notheengh to do weeth joo or joor behavior. Joo were never bad to heem. Never. He johs got nervous because he knew dees was serious. Ahmbeevahlehn', das heem. He has eeshoos.”

“Just kiiill meee nooow,” I moaned.

“What he did was not proper,” Papi said, eyes still closed. Mami and I both looked over at him. We thought he was asleep! We started laughing. “A guy who is serious doesn't do those things,” Papi added. “Paul was getting a bargain. You were more interested and much younger. I told Mami.”

“No
tafetán color champán
for me,” I said, reaching for one of Mami's Kools. A
Kool.
That's how bad it was. “No Lucida. No little blue box.”

“Der ees
tafetán color champán!
” Mami said, handing me her lighter. “Der ees Lucida an' de blue damn boxes! De theengh to do ees dat joo have to get out DER.”

“It's not too late for you,
gorda,”
Papi said. “When it comes to matters of the heart it's never too late for anything. You have so much time. No question. Paul's gonna try again, you'll see. It's a father's feeling.”

“But I'm a ‘hard feet,'” I said, exhaling the wretched mentholated smoke.

“I don' theenk joo are such a hard feet,” Mami said. “But joo are not for everybody, das for choor.”

“A bad, sad day,” I said, putting out the disgusting cigarette and taking a sip of the Diet Coke with Lime. Not exactly Parliaments and TaB, but in my angst I'd left my accoutrements downstairs, and at the moment I felt catatonic. “What did you ever do with that wedding list, anyway?”

“I got reed of eet dees morneengh,” Mami said. “Absolutely.
Joo want to know why? Because Paul look-ed like a goner weeth hees bagel. I thought to myself, ‘Right now, hees a total goner.' Besides, dat lees, de baseeck people weel always be on der, like Manny, so we don' need eet. I can make many lees. Very easily. Ees not a problem.”

“Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Papi.”

“Papi's sleepeengh,” Mami said. “Less leave heem een de rocker for now. Lohv poops heem out.”

“Poops me out, too,” I said, sliding under the cabbage roses with her.

“Con
Paul,
no se sabe,”
Mami said, turning off the lamp. With Paul, you never know. “Eet has to do weeth being deevorc-ed an' being cautious an' eh-stohf like dat.”

“That's what the rabbi said,” I told her, yawning.

“Nighty-nighty, Lulamae,” Mami said softly. “An' remember, eef dat Chair can get a man, den probably so can joo!”

B
asulto warned me,
“No tomes café.”
Don't drink coffee. Being Cuban, I drank it anyway. I would come to regret my decision. Stupid when not smart.

José J. Basulto,
Cubano Americano.
Miami developer. Former Bay of Pigs prisoner. Drank his own urine to stay alive in Fidel's jungle prisons. This is who was telling
moi,
a fellow Cuban,
not to drink coffee?
What was
his
problem? My handsome, fearless, no-nonsense pilot, fifty-two years old back in June 1993, was the president and cofounder of the Miami-based search-and-rescue operation known as Hermanos al Rescate, Brothers to the Rescue. The group of volunteer pilots oversaw the rescue of thousands of desperate Cuban
balseros,
rafters, fleeing an island in ruins. The
balseros
navigated the shark-infested Straits of Florida daily in precarious homemade
balsas,
rafts. Many died trying to reach freedom.

The
Washington Post
sent me to Key West to fly with the Hermanos. Mami was a wreckopotamia. About the possibility of
my
death by water.

“¿Tu 'tas loca?”
she cried. “Dat ees so stoopeed! Dey won' hire joo as a fool-time eh-staffehr an' joor reeskeengh joor damn life for dat fohkeengh newspaper?!?”

“Uh, yeah.” Mami had a point, though.

“Den don' tell me. I can't stand eet.”

I called Basulto and asked what must I do to prepare.

“Psychologically?” he said.

“Yeah. And any other way.”

“You can't prepare yourself for this,” he said. “Nobody can. Just be at Opa-Locka [Airport] at 7
A.M
. sharp the day after tomorrow as we planned.
Y no tomes café.
”

“Opa-Locka? Isn't that where Amelia Earhart took off on her final, not to mention FINAL, flight?”

“No tomes café.”

 

No one in my family had been back to Cuba since the day Hitler's devil spawn tried to steal my red tricycle, until Papi went on a humanitarian mission in 1990 with several other physicians belonging to B'nai B'rith. Each doctor was allowed to bring along forty-four pounds of giveaway medical supplies. Papi stuffed his carry-on bag with a million samples: Tylenol, Metamucil, Tums, you name it. He brought tampons and Band-Aids and Q-tips. Since he was going for a whole week, he figured that would be more than enough. Every sample was gone in a matter of two or three days. And the poor little Cubans clamored for more like aggressive, extra-needy trick-or-treaters when you've long since run out of Halloween candy, like, “Okay, you've run out of Snickers. Got any raisins, or what?” One weekday Papi was standing out in front of the Hotel Nacional, waiting for his chartered bus, when two very young, very pretty Cubanitas who spoke pretty
good Spanglish approached him. They might've been sisters. One looked about twelve, the other was maybe fifteen.

 

FIFTEEN:
¿Qué tal, señor?
Want company?

PAPI:
¿Qué?

TWELVE:
We like you.

P.:
Gracias.

F.:
Okay, me and her, all day, all night, one hundred American dollars.

P.:
What? Oh. Aren't you two supposed to be in school right now?

T.:
School. Right. Okay. Me and her, all day, all night, fifty American dollars. What do you think? We do
everything.

P.:
I'm…I'm waiting for my bus. Where are your parents?

(The girls have a private summit. Papi wonders what's taking the bus so long. He overhears T. say, “Si, but he hasn't said no yet!” They reapproach.)

F.:
Okay,
señor.
Best offer. Me and her, all day, all night, no dollars. Free.

P.:
Free? Why free?

T.:
You're at the Nacional, right?

P.:
So?

F.:
You got those little soaps and the toilet paper, right? We'll take those instead.

P.:
The little soaps and…Instead of cash?

F. AND T.:
Si.

P.:
Why?

T.:
We stink.

 

Papi got on the bus and went to visit the Conservative synagogue where he'd been Bar Mitzvahed so many years before.

It was a dump.

He went to see other places important to him and to our family: the house he grew up in, the temple where he and Mami were married, Baba Dora and Zeide Boris's house, my parents' newlywed house, which was
our
house, my very own baby guerrilla house.

Dump. Dump. Dump. Dump.

“It was like something out of
Dr. Zhivago,
” Papi later said, meaning the scene where Zhivago and his wife return to their old house after a long absence and their once beautiful home is now all gone to hell and inhabited by multiple peasants and other strangers. Ghosts.

“And the food in Cuba was horrible, too, by the way,” Papi added. “Forget it, you can only get good Cuban food in Miami. Cuba's not Cuba anymore. Not my Cuba. Not my home. Stupid little island.”

Papi was heartbroken. Part of him was sorry he ever went back to witness the ruin Cuba had rotted into. The tropical wasteland he encountered there had replaced the tropical paradise we left behind when we were young, a lifetime ago.

Papi said, “You know what American business would make the most money in Cuba today?”

I go, “Coca-Cola?”

“Nope.”

“Mickey D's?”

“Home Depot. The whole fucking place is falling apart.”

You can't fight the power. Communists' forte isn't exactly fantastic architecture or its maintenance. And yet, in a week or two, Papi turned philosophical.

He said, “Maybe it's good we had to leave Cuba.”

This was HUGE. Heresy in the eyes of a typical exile.

I go, “What?!? Why?!?”

Papi said, “Because. Cuba is really a very small island. When we lived there we thought it was the center of the universe. Leaving let us see a bigger world. We learned the world is vast. Much vaster than the one we knew. The experience made us grow.”

Unlike so many of our fellow Cubanos in exile, Papi had let go.

To those who insist on romanticizing Cuba, what can I possibly say to change your mind? You're entitled to your romance, even if it is a superficial cartoon fantasy that has nothing to do with me and my people's reality and history. Have your 1957 Chevy Tropicana Bacardi Hemingway Romeo y Julieta cigar chacha royal palm tree pipe dream—God knows everybody else does.
Vogue
can go down for “native color” and shoot some beautiful Narciso Rodriguez clothes that cost more than the island's entire treasury holds, maybe put a Ché Guevara T-shirt and beret on a Russian model for fun and stick a cigar in her mouth, like Faye Dunaway in
Bonnie and Clyde.
I won't mind. But I won't go. Not until anyone can go. Until then, I'll cut out the pictures and use them as screen-savers.

This is why, whenever people ask me if I've ever been back and why haven't I, I always think, Back for what? To see what? Cubans suffering under that aging, out-of-it, time-warp gangster who compares himself to Jesus and took my house and Zeide Boris's Camisetas Perro and Zeide Leon's Cuban American Textiles and Papi's Centro Médico Nacional? Or shall I return to my homeland to see all the beautiful little baby whores? Once magnificent buildings in crumbling decay? Silenced dissidents wasting away in jail? Brilliant mulatto musicians on the street who'll never be anywhere else? The talc-white sand at Varadero beach on whose seashell-studded strand Mami and I gamboled? The same sand el Almirante Cristobal Colón and his faithful Jewish interpreter Luis de Torres impressed with their sublime feet? That sand, its strand, those moaning, incandescent seashells,
the salty siren-and-shark-filled sea—are all off-limits except to cash-stuffed tourists. Which of these would I care to go and see today? I don't want to be hurt like my father was.

 

Yet here I was, ready to get into a tiny plane and go toward Cuba. On the day of our flight I awoke at dawn with a catchy Cuban nursery rhyme on my lips:
“Ay, Mamá Inés, ay, Mamá Inés, todos los Negros tomamos café”
…“Oh, Mama Ines, oh, Mama Ines, all of us Negroes drink coffee…”
Café, café,
give me my
café, coño.
Ignoring Basulto's warning, I polished off a delicious room service espresso—hello, how the hell else was I supposed to be conscious at first light in summer?—and drank a huge glass of ice water. Then I drank a can of
guanabana
(soursop) nectar, ate buttered
tostadas
and a boiled
huevo,
and smoked a Parliament. Yummy. Then I drank one more espresso—this one for the sky, as it were—and another glass of ice water, and peed. (I'm always drinking and peeing, this was nothing new.)

Now I was wide awake and ready to take flight! All right! Though it was already sweltering out at six, I was buzzing with caffeinated alertness and energy on my drive to Opa-Locka. The radio played a lively little Bola de Nieve ditty,
“Espabilate”
(“Wake Up”):
“Oyeme China, tan divina…espabilate, espabiiilate!”
“Listen to me, Chinese girl, so divine, awaken, awaaa-ken!”

I climbed into the rear right passenger's seat in Basulto's perfect powder-blue twin-engine Cessna, and my photographer, a guy, sat next to me. Basulto noted the girth of my huge straw tote bag—and it was extra-huge that day—and said, “Hey, if we go down, don't look for your purse, okay?”

“You're joking, right?” I said. Basulto smiled at his hunky young copilot, who smiled back. They both looked like movie
stars. Cuban action heroes. “Anyway, screw the purse. I'd dive for my notes! But this
is
a seaplane, right?”

“A
seaplane?
” Basulto said, laughing and playfully punching the copilot's chiseled upper arm. Basulto pulled on a navy-blue baseball cap with the number 2506 in yellow on the front, and aviator shades.
“Niña,
if we crash we go down inside the sea!”

“Inside the sea with the SHARKS?” I said, nervously reaching for my lip balm.

“We have a little storage space in the back,” Basulto said, putting on headphones and handing me a pair. “There's a self-inflating raft. If we crash, get in it.”

“I'll do that,” I said, looking behind me. Yep, there was a raft. Shit, I should've bought a case of TaB and refrigerated it overnight. You could squeeze four six-packs back there easy. You could stack up some cases. I looked out my triangular window as the fierce little plane rumbled and took off, a bird gliding into blue. At 110 mph, we were aloft in a flash, engines droning, sun shining, Basulto singing, “On a beautiful day like today…”

We headed south along the 82nd meridian, between the 24th parallel and the Tropic of Cancer. The world beyond the Cessna's clear windshield consisted entirely of bleached-blue sky and white clouds like hunks of torn cotton. Below us the Straits were waveless, flat as a dinner plate. The hot tropical sun sparkled diamonds on the surface that went on forever into the horizon. People always say “only” ninety miles to Cuba. From my aerial view, it may as well have been nine thousand. Or nine million.

It felt sticky in the cockpit. Sweat streaked across and down Basulto's cheeks. Mine, too. My face was wetting my notepad, drop by drop. Thank God I did the waterproof mascara.

“Oye
Basulto,” I said into my mike,
“porque hay tanto calor?”
Hey Basulto, why is it so hot?

“Quité 'l aire,”
Basulto's deep voice crackled back to me.
“Come gasolina.”
I cut off the a.c. Eats fuel.

This would be pleasant. Basulto peeled a banana and devoured it, tossing the peel out the window. He had no problem littering but God forbid you mess up his Cessna's seats with your dirty sneakers. So Cuban. Basulto was, as I jotted down in my notebook, stern, affectionate, wry, precise, courtly, spiritual, and fussy. He LOVES planes.

We'd been in the air for almost two hours. I was in massive Parliament and TaB withdrawal mode and had to pee real bad.

“
Oye
Basulto,” I said,
“Donde 'sta 'l baño?”
Where's the bathroom?

“¿¡¿El BAÑO?!? ¡Ay, Dios mío!”
He laughed maniacally and shot a macho look at the copilot.

“Me 'stoy muriendo,”
I wailed. I'm dying.

“¿Tu tomaste café esta mañana?”
he asked accusingly. Did you drink coffee this morning?

Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Look, I will pay you cash money to land this fucking plane in Cuba,” I said. “I don't care. I got Visas, I got MasterCards. We can't be that far away from Havana. I'll handle Castro's troops personally. I've done it before. I have to GO!”

Basulto chomped on a tropical plum, shaking his head and throwing little seeds out the window. So
that's
how you stayed hydrated without drinking coffee or water! This was becoming tragic—for me.

“Hey,” my photographer whispered to me, “if you wanna aim at this empty can I promise I'll try not to look at you while you do it.”

“Freak,” I said batting my hand. “Just…go 'way.”

“Oye niña,”
Basulto said,
“mira pa' 'llá.”
Look over there.

I looked out my window. Heat waves shimmered everywhere. We were crossing the southwest reaches of the Straits.

“¿Mira qué?”
I said. Look at what?

“Allí. Mira más duro.”
There. Look harder.
“¿Qué tu ves?”
What do you see?