Cuba Diaries (24 page)

I find myself praying that Juana will take
us
.

I tell Nick, before Juana comes for her second interview, that offering her $200 isn't enough, but he goes ahead and offers her $200 anyway. Juana counters, saying she can't work for less than $300 per month. Nick says that is all right, but then asks her not to discuss her salary with anyone else at the house.

I can't sleep, wondering whether the children will be happy with Juana and whether Juana will be happy with us. I worry that the $200 we offered Juana got us off to a bad start. Juana is more responsible and more dignified than I am, and she seems serene, too, and not desperate, as if in this land of no jobs she might find another job anytime she wanted to. I've seen the house she lives in, too: it's a nice house, with a banana grove in back of it and a late-model Lada in the carport.

They have caught the boys who kicked Lola's brother's neighbor's father-in-law to death—two seventeen-year-old
orientales
(literally, Orientals, meaning people from the former Oriente province, on the eastern end of the
island of Cuba, where the city of Santiago de Cuba is, or from any place east of Camagüey) have confessed.

“Take my car!” the
orientales
said the old man said to them. “You don't have to kill me.”

The
orientales
told the police they killed him because “the dead don't talk.”

A FROG NO BIGGER
than a nickle is found, alive, in the middle of Thea's high, old-fashioned, neatly made bed at 2
P.M
. on a school day. I ask the help if they put it there, as a present to Thea when she came home from school, but they look just as surprised as I do to see it there.

THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD
orientales
who kicked Lola's brother's neighbor's father-in-law to death have been executed by firing squad.

Nick and I go with Nicoletta to visit Bibi Sebaya. Bibi Sebaya is one of the few surviving residents of the Country Club area—all elderly women now—who never left Cuba and have held on to their houses.

The Cyclone fence is rusty, but the grass is mowed and the trees are clipped. The spacious rooms, spreading out in a V from the entrance, are long and low, paneled in dark wood, with brand-new upholstery on the furniture, all of it covered with clear plastic. A short, stout lady greets us speaking rapid Cuban. I think she's trying to tell us that her husband has died three months ago. I turn to Nicoletta to ask for help, and the lady breaks out in perfect American—she attended the Spence School in New York City.

It's just a tad funkier than a normal rich person's house. A bent-over maid shuffles by in a housedress. The floor could be cleaner, the outdoor furniture brighter, but still the effect is making me forget where I am. Bibi is like some rich friend of my mother's except for the enormous portrait of her young self in strapless tulle on an easel smack-dab in the middle of the living room: my mother's friends' portaits were usually over the mantel.

Her tale comes in fits and starts, but you can tell that she never tires of telling it.

She had two children with her first husband, then fell in love with a revolutionary, a rich boy who was with Fidel in the Sierra Maestra. He stopped being a revolutionary when Fidel became a Communist. He spent two years in prison on the Isle of Pines. She went with him to the Isle of Pines. She went
through almost everything you can go through in a revolution. The revolutionaries looted everything. “This house, that house.” She gestures with her hand around the Country Club compound. “There was one. A nigger named Manolo. Took the car of the old ladies across the street. ‘You rich people are fat. A revolutionary has to be thin,' he told me. I took my daughter to the doctor a few years later, and I saw him in the waiting room. He had a big belly, and his wife, a nigger in a red knit dress, was fat, too.
‘Qué tal, Manolo?
' I said. ‘You said a revolutionary was supposed to be thin, but look at you! You've become fat! What happened? And the car you stole from the old ladies, I saw it outside. You really wrecked it. And your wife's fat, too!'” Her grandson had been with her in the house but went with his mother (Bibi's daughter) to Canada. The boy was scared of his mother. His mother speaks four languages but works as a house cleaner in Canada. “She's a terrible girl,” Bibi says. She doesn't have good relationships with her daughters, who have characters like their father. One of her daughters denounced her second husband. Said he was CIA. They spent five days going through her house. He was sentenced to twenty years. Bibi wrote Fidel that he was falsely accused, and he got out the next day. She has had an account at a bank in New York ever since she was at Spence. The U.S. government won't let her touch it, though, because she lives in Cuba. She transferred as much as she could to Switzerland. Her mother lived in Rome for fifteen years. She shows us a picture of her with her mother in Rome. “My friends said I wouldn't recognize Rome anymore. It's full of niggers.” She's had cataract surgery. Even so, she can see only shadows. She loves her cats, especially her Siamese, which was given to her by the Lebanese ambassador next door. Every day, when her husband was dying, the cat would come and sit on the edge of the bed and stare at him. And the cat had never sat on the bed before. Bibi got diabetes late in life. Because of stress. Stress because of her other neighbor, the Finnish ambassador. She always got along so well with her neighbors. They were always lovely to her. She was great friends with the previous Finnish ambassador and his wife, but then they left, and Bibi says the ambassador's wife told her, “‘I would introduce you to the new ambassador and his wife, but I'm not going to do that because they're just horrible.' The new ambassador's wife kept trying to be friends with me, but I avoided her, saying, ‘My husband's just gotten out of jail and it wouldn't be right, to go to an ambassador's house.' She got more and more angry with me, until finally she was climbing up in the tree with a pair of binoculars, spying on me. She denounced me to the police.”

“Why?”

“For having geese. I had a flock of lovely geese. She said they made too much noise. They had never bothered anyone before. The police came and said they were going to cut off their heads. That sent me to bed with my first diabetes. I finally found a farm in the countryside to keep them, but we had to go every day to feed them. But I got my own back. I got that Finnish ambassador fired. My husband and I were in Switzerland, and in Geneva we met the Finnish foreign vice-minister and I told him what they had done, and he said his ministry would look into how they were behaving over there. They sent inspectors there, found all kinds of abuses, and the Cuban police caught them trying to smuggle five sets of silverware out of the country. They weren't just transferred; he was fired! And I got his little secretary fired, too—a fairy who used to have masked balls with all the other fairies.”

We are in a
paladar
by now, so good that we eat
escabeche
and roast pork. Bibi has fish and saves a piece for herself, wrapped in aluminum to take home.

Geese, fairies, and niggers
, I think in my bed as I try to digest the
escabeche
, the roast pork, and the disturbing terms that Bibi used in English, and I find myself wondering if the word
negrito
really was as breezy as all that.

Juana starts, but it is an unusual day, for there is the twice-monthly Polar Bar, a kind of open-house barbecue at the Canadian Embassy where children eat hamburgers and swim and chase one another around on the tennis court. Cubans are not allowed at the Polar Bar. Juana comes for an hour before the children go. I cop another mom at the Polar Bar to look after the kids there and drive them home to Juana, who will be waiting for them. We have to go to five events—two cocktail parties, an art opening, a dinner, and a dance concert.

When we come home, Juana is watching TV with Thea and Jimmie, who are both so tired from the Polar Bar that they won't go to bed. Juana looks at a loss. “This is not a typical night,” I whisper to Juana as I carry Jimmie upstairs.

Jimmie and Thea sprawl on beanbag chairs in their rooms, nightshirts hiked up above their waists, private parts challenging me in grim judgment as I demonstrate to Juana the telling of a bedtime story.

The allergist who saw Thea last year for her skin blotches, Dr. Yamila Lawton, calls me over the weekend to say she wants to see me.

Now she sits with me on the veranda. We speak about Thea. I tell her about the findings of the specialist we saw in New York. She compliments me on my Spanish. There is a pause. Her eyes, magnified by her glasses, look sheepish. “I suppose you're wondering why I am here.”

“Of course . . .”

“I have something to ask you.”

“That's all right.”

“I feel ashamed . . .”

“You can tell me.”

“You know the situation in this country . . .”

“Of course.”

“My son has just graduated from medical school. Look.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a photocopy of the diploma. “This is gold,” she says, tapping a medallion shape, black on the photocopy, at a corner of the diploma with her finger. “They only give the gold medallion to the best students. He worked so hard. I want to give him something, a present for his diploma, but . . .” Her voice breaks. “I feel so bad.” She opens her pocket-book, pulls out a handkerchief, blows her nose. “I'm sorry.”

“It's all right. Tell me.”

“You know how it is here.”

“I know.”

“What he would like more than anything, he says, is a radio–cassette player. They are so expensive for Cubans, but foreigners, I know, can get a discount.”

I tell her I will try to get a discount at the electronics department of the Diplomercado. It will have to be included with the purchase of other electronic items from the Diplo so that it doesn't look suspicious, but we do need an iron. Then I think again and tell her I can pick one up when I go to Orlando in two weeks. I say I also have to think about the weight they allow me to carry onto the plane in Miami. I ask her how large she would like the cassette player to be.

She says it doesn't have to be big at all, just as long as it has room for two cassettes.

“No problem.”

More tears, openings and closings of the pocketbook.

After she leaves, I realize that it hasn't been established whether I am supposed to pay for the cassette player or whether she is going to reimburse me. I have to wait and see what happens, I guess.

“But really, not that many people ask me for things,” I say to Nick later at the dinner table.

“That's because they don't know you well enough yet.”

Ivan, the one Cuban at the firm I can relate to besides our Elegguá (who is not really Cuban) has just been fired for stealing firm property—Ivan, who said nothing was more important than a child, and whose son, Eduardo, a cheerful seven-year-old, came here sometimes to play.

Nick says that it began because Bernard, Nick's second assistant, saw Ivan loading plumbing pipes belonging to the firm into his car. The number two assistant asked him who had authorized him to take the pipes. Ivan named Fritz, the number one assistant, who was on vacation. Bernard told Ivan to put the pipes back and wait for the return of Fritz. When Fritz returned, he said that he had never authorized Ivan to take any pipes. Quietly, Bernard started to make other investigations and discovered missing plumbing fixtures, too, and a bathroom mirror.

“Ivan must be doing over the bathroom at his family's house,” I say to Nick, serving myself a few more
tostones
.

Nick looks at me darkly.

“I mean, here we always thought he was a spy, and it turns out he was just a thief.”

I add that it's a pity Eduardo won't be able to play with Thea and Jimmie anymore. Eduardo was the only Cuban child they played with, apart from Yolanda at school.

We go to see an artist, Saidel Brito, at the Instituto Superior del Arte. Saidel Brito is the same artist who, at a show in the spring, presented a painting of the underside of a horse, four times larger than life, suspended from the ceiling, its testicles coming at you like two bombs. Underneath it, hung waist-high, was a burlap sling full of actual horseshit.

El Caballo, Fidel is called, but you can still paint a horse.

This time Saidel Brito has made a painted terra-cotta statue of a goat lying on his back on a lawn chair.
Caribbean Man
, Saidel calls it. The goat is wearing sunglasses and an undershirt, one leg is crossed over the other, its balls lolling formlessly on the chaise.

Juana is the Rolls-Royce of nannies, as far as we can make out. She has gotten the children to speak Spanish. “
Cómo? No quieres hablar español conMIGO?
” (“What? You don't want to speak Spanish with ME?”), Juana says, rolling her eyes and tickling them until they speak Spanish without realizing that they are speaking Spanish. She is tireless. She plays Ping-Pong, hide-and-seek, capture the flag, handball, badminton without a net, checkers, cards, Spanish word games. She settles down with them on big pillows and reads with them or to them. She builds forts with them out of pillows, tables, and chairs and sits with them with a flashlight under blankets, telling them stories. She teaches them chess, how to read palms, and Cuban children's songs.

I get Juana's personal story in snatches, for we are not together much. She comes to the house for a few hours in the afternoon after the children are home from school, then stays on if we have to go out in the evening. If we come home very late, she calls her husband, Hernando, to come and get her in their car. Otherwise she walks home.