Authors: Ana Menendez
By this time, the scheduled departure time of the flight had come and gone. But strangely, my usual anxiety was absent. I felt part of a flowing mass of people that seemed stronger than schedules. Presently, I came to a woman at a foldout table who checked my name, passport and visa number against a computer printout. After this I was given a number and, after another wait, was finally allowed to pass into another chamber with my baggage, where several guards picked up our bags, poking them here and there, before depositing them on a conveyor belt that then sent them through a huge white contraption that looked like an MRI machine. By the time I emerged from the underground darkness, holding my ticket, I was recalling with fondness how easy it had been to travel through Jamaica all those years before. I was beginning to regret this form of legal travel and dreading whatever sister-tortures awaited me on the other side in Havana. It was now two hours past the departure time, but when I asked a woman at the gate about it, she just smiled and said, Don't worry so much.
In Havana, it was past midnight by the time we made it off the airplane and onto a rickety bus that deposited us at the terminal. My heart sank a little at the seemingly interminable line at immigration. But this moved fairly quickly.
And the young and nice-looking man who took down my information ended by asking me for a date. Past immigration, the airport was empty, most of the lights out. We gathered our bags, and I was surprised and relieved to find that no one was guarding the exit.
Though it was, I believe, a weeknight, the crowds were five or six deep outside the airport. Most of the men and women seemed to be shouting for relatives, many of whom I imagined might have changed over the years to the point of being unrecognizable. I took a rattling car to the Habana Libre, scarcely aware of the dark countryside around me; at the hotel, I handed my voucher to the woman at the reception desk and barely made it up to my room before collapsing into bed.
I was woken very early the next morning by the sun coming in through the open blinds. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was. I walked to the window and stood in front of it for some moments.
I had been given a high, ocean-facing room and the water took up almost half the view. It shone silver and blue in the early light, and my throat seized at the beauty of it. I knew, too, that beyond the line where the ocean seemed to meet the sky lay Miami, that short, short flight away that somehow now seemed the longest flight I had taken in my life, so far away did I suddenly feel from that world I had left. To the west, the proud lines of the Nacional Hotel. And below me, around me, the streets of Havana, just now beginning to fill with life. I
looked over the city, amazed, as one tends to be when viewing the streets from this distance, at how small and tidy it all seemed. My eyes fell over the small row houses to the east, and I wondered from which one Teresa had made her dreams. Upon which balcony did she stand to stare up at the hotel where I now stood at the window, as if I were looking down into the eyes of my own past?
I was thinking these things in a sort of dream state when I gradually became aware of a low droning noise. I turned my gaze here and there until finally from behind a building there emerged, as if torn from another dimension, an old biplane. It passed low and so close to the window that I thought I had a view of the pilot before I snapped out of my shock and ducked down to the ground. I sat crouched below the window until the droning noise faded and then I stood, suddenly very awake, and wondering if I had invented this vision. A few moments later, I heard the droning again and the plane emerged from behind the hotel, this time with its pilot waving, I thought, in my direction.
I don't usually take breakfast in hotels, preferring to find a small cafe where I can linger over coffee in silence without the agitation brought on by large families, who seem, by some universal law of travel, to breakfast exclusively in hotel cafeterias. But from what I remembered of Havana, the cafe option was out. So I took the elevator down to the dining room with trepidation, not only over the noise of unruly travel-exhausted children
that surely awaited me, but over the dreadful food that had no doubt been laid out with heartbreaking ceremony. When last I had been here, the country was beginning its slide into the special period and even touristsâthose revered deities of the tropicsâhad to make due with white toast and a revolting gray lunch meat served day after day in a dingy dining room.
Downstairs, I was greeted with much attention by an eager and aggressive klatch of waiters. One took my breakfast voucher (Havana, it seemed, had moved to the dollar and voucher economy), another checked my name on a computer and a third finally smiled and pointed me to the main room.
There, I was amazed to find not the sad state that I had remembered, not even the sorry buffet one encounters now and then in the lesser hotels of Europe, but a gleaming dining room arranged around islands piled high with tropical fruits, several kinds of breads, pastries, juices and real bacon and sausages. At one end, a woman in a black and white uniform poured out guava juice into small glasses. At the other, a jovial man in a tall white hat took orders for omelets. I stood in the omelet line, and after I told the cook what I wanted he asked me where I was from. Not wanting to attract attention to myself as an American, I answered, almost without thinking, Spain. He looked at me for a second and said, Ah, the south, then. I nodded, and was distressed when he kept asking me questions. When did I arrive? Just last night. Alone? Was this man working for the government? I couldn't decide if I was paranoid or tired, but just the same, I answered
that I was alone at the moment but my husband would join me shortly.
Later, relaxing with my second cup of coffee, I wondered where that response about a husband had come from. I had never been self-conscious about being unmarried. And I didn't think that I was self-conscious now. The fact that I had not yet married was one of those things that I accepted. I didn't feel much about it either way. I had nothing against the idea of marriage, just as I didn't expect that being married would change my life in any significant way. I had been in love a few times and it had been pleasant, but it had never been the way one saw in movies, the way Teresa had written about it. I had no way of knowing, of course, if this was failure on my part or the world's; in the end each of us exists in a small universe of our own making. But now, this outburst about a husband made me wonder just how certain I could be about the things I believed.
I made a left out of the hotel and walked toward L Street, the neighborhood still familiar to me after all those trips to my grandfather's old streets. I knew she no longer lived at the old house, but I suppose that I still hoped I might be able to find someone who knew her. I didn't have a plan on how I would find her. And I had already considered the likelihood that she didn't want me to find her. After all, if what she wrote was true, she had had her chance some years before to engage me in person and had chosen instead to send me an anonymous packet. And she had never included her address.
I walked down L for a while and then turned on 25th and followed this toward the water. I was reminded of all those years past when I had walked along some of these same streets with much the same goal: to learn of my parents. Then, it had not seemed so daunting to knock on the doors of strangers. But in the time that had passed, my natural shyness must have settled into me, rather like a stain setting with age, and several times on that final trip back to Havana I turned away from a door, my hands sweating. I knew that eventually I would have to do it, would have to knock on a stranger's door and ask questions and be engaged. But that first day I decided to give myself more time to get used to the idea. And so I spent my first hours in Havana acting like any other tourist, stopping now and then in front of a crumbling old beautiful house to admire its lines, all the while wondering, Is this the one?
Thinking back on this, I believe I was also thrown by how much the city had changed in ten years, how little it resembled the Havana I remembered. Dollars, which were still illegal when I first began coming here, were now the only accepted currency in most places. The entrance around even the smallest hotels swarmed with beautiful young women in short skirts, special companions to the European tourists who had turned the clock back on the capital. Watching one long-legged beauty on the arm of a round little man, I wondered how many of these tourists claimed sympathy to the revolution even as they savored the fruits that Batista had once tended so well.
Everywhere, the socialist experiment seemed dead and buried, awaiting only the death and burial of its maximum
leader. The men and women I passed in the streets were better dressed than I remembered, all of them moving quickly as if in a great hurry to get somewhere. And on every other block I discovered a new store. I wandered in and out of these, hoping to find some old photographs or books. But most seemed dedicated to the most basic kinds of longings. At street level under the hotel, several stores had opened, including a liquor store with wine and champagne and bright red boxes of Pringles. The Focsa, a dismal apartment complex that I remembered stumbling upon during my last visit, now bustled with stores, and even a kiosk to check purses and bags. I walked through the dark little maze under the building until I came upon a dollar store, not in the old Cuban tradition of diplo-tiendas, but a dollar store as defined by Miami: a little hole-in-the-wall, selling every manner of cheap trinket for an American dollar. More incredible was the line of people waiting to get inside.
That evening, I walked to El Nacional for a drink and to write my notes. I sat outside on the porch overlooking the sea. Passing on the mojito that the waiter tried to force on me, I ordered instead a glass of white wine. I sat drinking it, lulled by the breeze and the easy beauty of the hotel, the lawn, the people; and when I was done I ordered another glass. And then surprised myself by ordering a third. The wine hit me pretty hard and I sat out until it was dark, trying to gather my senses.
I slept badly, blaming it on the wine. Sometime in the night I woke, sure that I had heard the wind banging. But when I
opened the blinds, the scene before me was serene; the moonlight reflected smoothly on the water. I returned to bed, still unsettled. Suddenly everything about the trip seemed wrong, the task before me impossible.
Morning found me in a better state, though I rose with the unhappy feeling that something terrible had happened. At breakfast, the omelet man greeted me as La Española, and I took a table in the farthest corner of the room to avoid his gaze. I was determined that day to knock on a few doors. But first I thought I would take a walk to find my courage. This time, once out of the hotel and onto 25th, I decided to walk away from the water. I passed a church and, peering in, realized it was Sunday, the pews packed with worshipers. I walked on. I turned at a corner, and after a few more blocks a little boy fell in step with me and together we walked in silence. Hello, I finally said in English. Hello, he answered back. Are you British? I thought for a moment. Cuban, I said. He stopped dead, feigning great surprise, and I laughed at this hard little actor. For a long stretch the little boy walked with me, pointing out houses and telling me fantastical stories about them: And that house there is where a famous dragon used to live. See where it's burned by his breath? That's where he stood every day to watch the people pass. The child was delightful, and I found myself after a while following him instead of him me. We came, or he led me, finally to a sprawling open-air market that seemed to rise as a mirage out of a colorless little part of Havana. Before I could protest much, he had grabbed me by the hand and led me in. We passed kiosks piled high with heads of lettuce, carrots, radishes, tomatoes, piles
and piles of fresh greens. The little boy, whose name I still didn't know, pulled me along until he finally stopped in front of a display of meat and began to order. I played the dupe and we spent the next hour or so shopping like mother and son, he devising the menu and I supplying the dollars, which along with something called the dollar peso seemed to be the only currency accepted.
We left the open market burdened with bags. I followed the boy through twists and turns of streets and cracked sidewalks and old men who stood to watch us go by. We arrived after what seemed an interminable walk at a large block of apartment buildings. My feet throbbed and my fingers were red and sore where the bags hung. The little boy invited me up to see his mother, but I politely refused. I was still a little wary of entering people's homes, a habit of many travels in solitude. The boy insisted and when I made it clear that I wouldn't budge he began to call up to the windows, Oye, Vieja! Vieja!
After a few seconds of this, a beautiful young woman appeared at one of the sixth-floor windows and waved, making hand signals to come up. At last, I relented, following the boy through a front door that, though its glass front was completely gone, he insisted on opening for me.
I stood then at the bottom of a grimy box-way of stairs, the boy already racing ahead of me. I was so exhausted from the walk to whatever part of town I now found myself in that the climb took me several long minutes, and by the time I made it to the apartment the boy's mother was apologizing, saying everyone experienced difficulties with the stairs, but that she
and the boy were so used to them that they barely noticed. Eventually, one adapts to almost anything and stops complaining, the woman said. She laughed, looking me over, and then added, That's why this country is in the state it's in.
I followed the woman and the boy into the apartment. It consisted of just two rooms set apart by a gas burner. But it was neat and bright. The young woman sat me down on a sofa and brought me coffee, all the while talking almost too quickly for me to follow. She didn't apologize for the boy's corralling me into buying all that food, but she thanked me so profusely that I took it she and the charming boy had developed a good scam, part of whose successful execution was to pretend that the victim was just a generous visitor arriving for an appointed lunch.