Paris Was Ours (21 page)

The Tribulations of a Cuban Girl in Paris

T
HE FIRST TIME
I visited Paris—what a lovely, unreal phrase! — I was just twenty-three, I had never in my life been on a plane, and the only idea I had of the City of Light was just that: a sort of vague glow imported from my readings of Balzac, Flaubert, Rabelais, Proust; by the paintings of the impressionists and Fantin-Latour, Gustave Courbet, Marie Laurencin …; by the songs of Claude François (although Lully’s opera
Atys
had come first, as had Umberto Giordano’s
Andrea Chénier
), Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Juliette Gréco, Barbara, and Serge Gainsbourg; by the movies shown in Havana movie theaters and sometimes, from Easter to the Día de San Juan, on Cuban television —
Les demoiselles de Rochefort, Le gentleman de Cocody, Fantômas, Rocco et ses frères, Fanfan la tulipe, Le samouraï, Les tribulations d’un chinois en Chine
, and my favorite,
La belle et la bête
.

I wanted my voice, my hair, to be like Françoise Dorléac’s; I yearned to seem as melancholy as Catherine Deneuve, to feel loved by Jean Marais, and to be kidnapped by Alain Delon, though rescued by Jean-Paul Belmondo. I longed to write and direct movies like Jean Cocteau, and I dreamed that my grandfather was a very funny old gentleman named Fufu—Louis de
Funès. In real life, it was my grandmother who bore an eerie resemblance to that brilliant man, who in my opinion was one of the greatest actors ever seen by humankind.

From all these works and people I had acquired my first notions of Paris, and of France. Ah, but I mustn’t forget my then husband’s uncle, one of those exile
gusanos
—worms—excoriated by Castro but transformed by the magic of Jimmy Carter into a butterfly, who on his first trip from Puerto Rico to Cuba, his second home—he’d been born in Spain but raised in Cuba—stepped off the plane with suitcases filled with Chanel No. 5. The family was expecting chorizos or, if not chorizos, something equally suitable for satisfying its Communist hunger, but he showed up with Chanel No. 5, and I, at least, appreciated it enormously. Since we had nothing to eat, or nothing but shit, I’d lost interest in food. It was the first time anybody had ever given me French perfume; the fact is, it was the first time I’d
seen
a bottle of French perfume, or smelled it. Till then the only thing I’d worn was Red Moscow, which stank, and Paris, a Bulgarian cologne named for the hero of the
Iliad
.

That first trip of mine to Paris was not a pleasure trip, exactly. I should make it clear that in 1983, very few Cubans could travel outside Cuba, and those who did travel invariably did so for the same reasons: they were either representatives of the regime who were authorized to travel, or “traitors” to the regime who were departing, lugubriously and forever, into exile. Only a handful of marriages to foreigners were beginning to occur at this time, and the
jinetes
and
pingueros
—whores and hustlers—had not yet come on the scene, at least not like now, in such extraordinary numbers and under such abusive conditions
for themselves. I was a member of the first category above, those “authorized to travel,” although I was not a government functionary—I was actually a student at the university. But I was
married
to a functionary, the editor of a film magazine that I myself, several years later, would edit. It seems my husband had fallen out of grace for having defended a movie that Fidel Castro hated. In Cuba, when one of the Castro brothers hated somebody, the person in question knew there were two possible fates for him from that point on: a velvet-box exile in an embassy somewhere abroad (the famous
traversée du désert
, as the French so elegantly call it), or the firing-squad wall. There was a third option, though it was the least attractive of them all: being “sent to the tank” — prison.

My functionary-husband was sent off to an embassy, as first secretary. His boss at the magazine was made ambassador, and all the others on the boss’s staff were sent abroad, too. The men weren’t allowed to travel unaccompanied, since the government argued that the CIA might send a spy in the guise of a lover, to entrap them and force them to desert. That was when they decided we had to get married, so I could accompany my functionary-husband on the new assignment he’d been given by the Revolution, as far as possible from the world of Cuban culture. Anyone in their right mind would say that a trip to Paris was a reward. But in the mind of the Communists, the reward was Moscow—Paris was a punishment.

And that was how I came to board a plane run by the most religious airline in the world—Cubana, which flew when it was the will of God to fly. That was the saying, anyway. So I abandoned a room in Old Havana—no water, no electricity, no stove, with a collective bathroom down the hall—to move
to a city that I had been dreaming about practically since I was born. My grandmother never stopped telling us that babies came from Paris, wrapped in a diaper and brought by a stork. That meant that I—in my fantastical mind—was making a journey back home.

In Havana I was always very Parisian; in Paris, I’ve always been very
habanera
. But I only realized that years later. I left in December of 1983, alone with a man I’d married overnight who’d been turned overnight into a diplomat. I left without my mother, virtually alone. (Traveling with a man is traveling alone.) I knew nothing about the world; all I knew was what Fidel’s daily news programs told me: The world was a bad place, the worst of humanity. Cuba was a gem, a paradise. Outside, the entire world wanted to be like Cuba. Traveling in those days, at the age of twenty-three, was for me like a trip for a three-year-old today. My sixteen-year-old daughter knows more about the world than I could even imagine when I was her age. But then she doesn’t know Cuba. Although she was born there, it’s the only country she doesn’t know anything about.

The first problem in traveling to a cold country in the middle of December was clothes. I had two summer dresses, two pairs of jeans, two light turtlenecks—that was it. We were taken to a store, called La International, where the only people who could make purchases were the functionaries being sent to the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. The only things in the store for sale were bolts of gray or brown wool cloth. I picked out six yards of brown wool, and my mother-in-law made me a coat copied from an old French magazine. The lining was made from a burlap sack, dyed, and it was so
stiff that when I wore the coat it looked like I was disguised as a transatlantic steamer—which seemed to my mother-in-law the right sort of look for crossing the ocean.

The first few weeks I wore that coat in Paris, there wasn’t a person on the street who didn’t stare at me, and anybody who knows Paris knows that in Paris, nobody looks at anybody—nothing is striking enough to draw a true Parisian’s second glance. Except, that is, for me in my boat disguise.

The first night I spent in Paris, I fainted twice. Dropped like a chicken with its neck wrung. The lights, the perfumes—so much light, so many lovely fragrances at once, just literally bowled me over. The second time I fainted was as I was walking past one of those little ovens they have in the street for roasting chicken. The smell of that chicken entered my nose, went up to my brain, passed through my arteries, and bang! — I hit the sidewalk. I’d never smelled so much roast chicken in my life. The last time we’d had chicken in my house in Havana was when my grandmother was sick. I was ten years old. Six months later we couldn’t go to pick up the rest of the chicken we were entitled to on our ration card because my grandmother had the bad luck—for us—to die two days before the next shipment to the store came in.

The day after my fainting spells, the ambassador from the Cuban Office to UNESCO insisted that I go to the hospital. Everything went smoothly there—I had a blue diplomatic passport, I was seen immediately—under the fixed gaze of a Spanish Communist driver sent precisely to keep that stern eye on us. It turned out the Spanish Embassy was on the verge of firing him, as they’d discovered he had a “vice,” as they termed it: he played the
tiercé
, the French version of the horseracing
trifecta. But the Spanish Communist said his mea culpas or mea Cubas (thanks, Guillermo Cabrera Infante) and they reinstated him in the service of automobiles and surveillance of the embassy and the Cuban Office to UNESCO. At that point he became more of a Castroite than Castro.

I weighed forty-three kilos—less than ninety-eight pounds—and had full-blown anemia, and when I told the doctor about the circumstances under which I’d lost consciousness the second time, he smirked and said—obviously, said the driver later, that doctor was no Communist, and was probably actually an enemy of the Revolution—that instead of smelling the chicken, what I should have done was buy some and eat it. And that was what he prescribed for me: Eat chicken, meat in all its many varieties, and fruit. And he assured me that this was the first time he’d ever recommended this to a woman in France, but he ended by saying, “Fatten yourself up, madame, or the next time you fall you will break a bone!”

Which is exactly what happened. The third time I fell, I broke my coccyx. So I was confined to my bed for two months, with my ass in state, eating, reading, watching French television, where everybody talks and I could hardly understand a word. That was another thing—I spoke exactly zero French. That’s why when we left the hospital and I listened to that driver spewing fire and brimstone against the doctor, I couldn’t understand quite why he was doing it. Until, that is, he translated what the doctor had said when he said, “Les gens qu’arrivent des pays communistes atterrissent d’abord chez le médecin, et ensuite, vous allez voir: attendez-vous à une crise de foie”: “People arrive from these Communist countries and the first place they wind up is at the doctor’s, and then, you wait and see,
prepare yourself for a liver crisis.” And as a matter of fact, after two months being laid up in bed eating everything, or almost everything, I did have a liver crisis. When the doctor advised me to eat meat, I’d forgotten to explain to him that with what the Cuban government paid me each month for being a Cultural Documentary-Film Maker I could buy only four chickens (one per week) and not much else. But that was fine with me—since in Cuba I couldn’t eat a chicken even once a year and hadn’t actually tasted chicken since I was ten years old, I spent my Paris money on cheap chocolates from Ed l’Épicier. Not for nothing was my liver ready to pop. When I got to the hospital, the doctor on duty asked if I was an alcoholic. “No,” I said. “Chocoholic.”

Once those first hospital traumas were behind me and my tremendous sense of melancholy, homesickness, missing my mother, had become less intense, I started sneaking out. We weren’t allowed to go out alone; we had to be accompanied by two of the embassy’s policemen-with-diplomatic-passports—nice guys at first glance but, especially the Asturian driver, grouchy as hell. But I started taking on jobs that nobody wanted to do: taking the mail to
la poste
, being a messenger between the embassy and the offices of various UNESCO countries. Between one visit and another, I’d go out to the street, breathe some fresh air, smoke a cigarette, and walk two or three times around the Métro entrance. I’d never entered the Métro; I was terrified of entering the Métro. The Communists said women were raped and murdered there. The other thing I was terrified of was shopping. To Communists, shopping was an illness, a disease. And I wanted to go home to my mother in the same condition she’d seen me leave in: healthy, perfectly healthy,
although with an almost chronic anemia and less meat on my bones than it would take to make a meatball.

Finally I was given the assignment of carrying some secret correspondence between the UNESCO office and the Cuban Embassy. That day the Asturian driver was working with the ambassador and the diplomatic police in an important meeting to prepare for the visit of a high-ranking French government official. There was no help for it: I’d have to take the Métro. The Spanish secretary—another Communist—walked with me to the entrance of the Métro, showed me how to buy a ticket, how to slip it into the slot, and how to quickly slip inside. I got stuck three times. I looked around—I was more embarrassed than I’d ever been in my life. People couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get through the turnstile. I banged into that turnstile so many times that the ticket seller finally came out of his booth and opened the handicapped entrance for me, thinking I had some sort of brain malformation that prevented me from entering the Métro like a normal person. Once I’d delivered those important documents that made me incredibly nervous because everywhere I looked I could see the Enemy that was going to snatch them out of my hands in broad daylight—of course I didn’t open the envelope (it’s best to remain ignorant of a dictatorship’s secrets), although I admit I was tempted—I left the embassy and walked back. It was then that I felt—that I breathed—free. I was alone, apparently nobody was watching me, and if I felt like it, I could take off running to the American Embassy and ask for political asylum. I didn’t; I wanted to see my mother again and I was too in love with my husband. And when you’re too in love, the other person oftentimes isn’t, but that’s another story.