Havana Noir (28 page)

“Look, Tom, you don’t know—” I started to say, but then Raúl excused himself and trotted off to bathe, bumping right smack into me.

“I am so sorry!” he said, the hot water having splashed him, not me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded as Raúl and Dionisio’s mother shrugged, both slightly chagrined.

In the meantime, Tom laughed, practically skipping back to Mrs. Wu with a cold glass of water.

I confess I was amazed in Cuba—not at Socialism’s wonders, even as Tom rattled off literacy rates (“The highest in the Western Hemisphere—even higher than the United States!” he exuded) and infant mortality rates (“The lowest in the Western Hemisphere—even lower than the United States!”). More precisely, I was astounded by how my sense of being an islander was constantly challenged. Nearly every Cuban I met happily confessed he or she couldn’t swim. This, of course, was nearly unheard of in Hawai’i, where learning to swim is no more of an option than learning to breathe. The Cubans sat on their weathered Malecón with their backs to the sea, unaware and undisturbed, chatting and drinking and sometimes even fishing, their lines dangling behind them as they continued their social dalliances. Just looking at them facing away from the water like that gave me the willies.

They wore shoes—flats and loafers but often heavy-soled shoes, more suitable for mountain climbing than anything else, and even better if the shoes were some brand they recognized: Mephisto, Doc Martens, and Prada of course. And they kept those shoes on all the time, even in their own homes, constantly wary of germs and viruses that, according to them, were both ubiquitous and lethal if they attached themselves to a naked foot.

“You don’t die from the virus,” Raúl explained, trying to reassure me, “but from the symptoms.”

These were said to be utterly extravagant. There was the patatú, an attack of undetermined origin completely undetectable by medical science, the sirimba (a milder form), and a whole series of weird medical conditions with no translations that even Rocky openly laughed about. What was crazy was that Dionisio—a medical doctor!—actually seemed to sign on to these diagnoses.

“You’re telling me that you really believe empachos can only be caused by eating too much Cuban food?” I asked.

Dionisio nodded serenely. He was less handsome than charming, with a gentility in his eyes that made my sister’s attraction to him completely understandable.

“But isn’t that just indigestion?” I asked, irritated. “Couldn’t you just get it from overeating anything?”

He shook his head. “No, no—this is particular. Malía, it doesn’t happen to people who don’t have a regular diet of Cuban food.”

Was he kidding me? I couldn’t tell. I was going to ask him about embolias, which I suspected, having killed his father, might take us down a more serious path, but then he started talking about serenos, a condition said to occur when you step outside and are enveloped in the night air.

“The night air? For real?” I asked, looking for cracks in his façade.

Dionisio shrugged. “And only old people can tell if you really have it.”

“That’s so mental! C’mon!”

Rocky laughed and laughed. “She’s not very Cuban, see?”

“Of course she is,” he said sympathetically, then reached out to touch the back of my head. His fingers dug through my hair to my scalp. “Absolutely she is.”

“What are you doing?” I snapped, pulling away from him. Rocky was holding her sides now, she was laughing so hard.

“Well, it’s as I suspected, somebody probably touched your mollera when you were born,” he said after his cursory examination of the spot at the very top of my skull.

“My what?”

“Your mollera.”

I looked at Rocky for clarification but she was bright red, tears streaming down her face. “Your…” She pointed at the back of her head between gulps and hysterics.

“It’s a soft cranial spot, very sensitive, much more sensitive on Cuban babies than on any other babies,” Dionisio said, still straight-faced. “You know, if it gets touched when you’re little—if it gets touched the wrong way—you can suffer irreparable harm, like losing your Cubanness. But yours—”

“Por dios!” I said in Spanish, naturally Cubed for once. “You’re just playing with me!”

And they both fell back on the couch, Rocky bubbling like lava and Dionisio finally erupting, slapping his thighs and his chest in the national fashion.

It wasn’t until later, alone in my noisy room writing in the travel journal I’d decided to keep for my parents, that I realized I’d never gotten a chance to ask about embolias.

As a result of the Cubans’ collective hypochondria, we had to watch for germs and viruses that could cause these things, and wear shoes—real shoes—all the time. To me, it was a real hardship not to go barefoot in the house. But my slippahs, which were the only things that really made sense to me day to day in the tropics, were a source of such embarrassment that one night, Dionisio’s mother asked Rocky to please suggest I not wear them as we headed out to a nearby casual restaurant.

“Just wear sandals,” my sister said, amused.

But it was all I could do to keep from laughing when Tom Mahler showed up that night with his feet encased in the dirtiest, most disgusting rope sandals I’d ever seen. Halfway to the restaurant, the left one came apart and he just chucked it to the side of the street (trash cans were virtually nonexistent, even in touristy areas like Chinatown, so that Rocky and I, our American habits ingrained, tended to walk around with handfuls of trash at any given moment) and kept going with only one sole protected.

“Oh, Tom, you can’t do that, it’s littering!” Rocky said, picking up the sandal remains between her thumb and index finger.

The entire family looked on in horror at each step Mahler took, warning him about upcoming dog feces, unidentified animal remains, vomit, and other revolting obstacles.

“You’re such gringas!” he exclaimed, motioning to the rest of the family for support with a flail of his arms. In response, they just nodded again.

“Tom—” I started to say, but Rocky elbowed me so hard, I almost lost my balance.

“That’s not ordinary trash—it’s hemp, it’s organic, it’ll decompose,” he explained.

“Not for a long time, Tom, not for a long time,” Rocky said.

She carried that thing all the way to the restaurant, dumped it in the kitchen trash, and, because she was carrying her own bar of soap in her purse, was able to scrub her hands before settling down to eat. The entire family maneuvered to avoid Tom Mahler, so he sat next to me, his left leg across his right knee, the germ-infested bottom of his foot bumping into me and leaving viral traces on my skirt throughout the meal.

“Careful or you’ll have an empacho,” Dionisio said, his chin pointing at the huge chicken and rice dinner before me.

In all honesty, I could hardly eat. Rocky’s jab had had its effect. “I thought you needed a regular diet of Cuban food to be vulnerable to those,” I shot back, trying to be jovial.

“Well, you’re on your way,” Mahler said, grinning malevolently, “don’t you think? Soon you’ll be like your sister, Cuban again, wanting to stay. Then you’ll have a fully rounded Cuban diet all the time.”

Infuriatingly, the family—Dionisio and Rocky included—again just smiled, their lips zipped.

It was just a few days before my scheduled departure (a long, roundabout trip from Havana to Kingston to Miami to Houston to San Francisco to, finally, Honolulu) when Dionisio and Rocky announced a party.

“But not just any party—a luau!” said Rocky.

“A luau?” I asked. Was she kidding?

“Turns out,” she said, all excited, “that Eddie Kamae is in Havana for a world music festival. Dionisio found out and invited him to dinner.”

“So maybe he’d like a typical Cuban flesta or something instead of another luau, don’t you think?”

Rocky waved me off. “Don’t you see? It’s such a great opportunity to show the family a little bit of Hawaiian culture. Eddie’s probably getting plenty of Cuban everything from his festival hosts.”

When we told Tom Mahler, he immediately filed his protest: He thought it inappropriate that Rocky and I—nonHawaiians—should be leading anyone through a Hawaiian experience. “You yourselves have gone out of your way to tell me you’re not Hawaiian, and now you’re pretending to be our cultural tour guides?”

“Don’t worry, Tom,” Rocky said with a wink, “it won’t be authentic, but diluted and commercialized—as much as we can do that here.”

To my surprise, the family laughed openly and Mahler, stuck somewhere between pride and embarrassment, shrunk a little.

To prepare, we put together the Hawaiian supplies I’d brought and went out searching for a few other necessary items, like flowers and pork. Raúl was negotiating for a lively little piglet raised on a neighbor’s balcony when, unable to keep silent anymore—it’d been almost a month of putting up with Tom Mahler and following everybody else’s passive example—I confronted Dionisio and Rocky.

“What’s the deal with Mahler? I mean, why do you guys even put up with him?”

Dionisio grinned. “Malía, you don’t believe he’s part of the family?”

“No, I don’t think you guys can stand him—which is why I don’t get why you let him think that he is.”

Rocky cleared her throat. “It’s another one of those Cubed things,” she said.

“What did you call him when I first explained it to you?” Dionisio asked her.

“Pet foreigner,” Rocky said in English.

“That’s right, he’s our pet foreigner,” Dionisio repeated.

“Your what?”

“Our pet foreigner,” he repeated, relishing the English through his laughter. “It’s every Cuban family’s aspiration to have one. See, we need someone who can travel back and forth, bring us things, bring us dollars, and remind us that there is another world.”

“One of the pet foreigner’s obligations,” Rocky chimed in, “is also to give hope.”

“And you don’t count?” I asked pointedly.

“Sometimes, yes,” she said.

“But sometimes not,” said Dionisio, now screwing up his face with mock concern. “Because, frankly, these days she doesn’t bring in much more in real dollars than a well-connected Cuban. Yes, we get wasabi and ukulele music, but no hulas—did I tell you?—she won’t grace us with a hula—”

“That’s
her
job,” Rocky said, her chin aiming at me.

“I’m not dancing hula here,” I said. “But—wait—you’re going off subject.”

“Ah, yes, the pet foreigner. How is my English, eh?”

“Diiiiiiiiiiiiiooooooooonisio!”

“Yeah,” he said as he and Rocky laughed it up, slapping their chests and snapping their hands in the air. “Okay, so what can we do? He attached himself to us and we realized, here’s one lonely little leftist. So we took him in. Don’t get me wrong—there’s real affection there. And he is well-intentioned. You see, he really believes. He believes so much that he just can’t see
why
we need him.”

“Or that you might be using him.”

“Malía!” Rocky said, aghast.

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you see that it’s mutual?” Rocky argued. “Don’t you see how Dionisio’s family authenticates his experience?”

“Sure, but—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Dionisio literally put himself between us. He turned to Rocky. “Why pretend? Of course we’re using him.” Then he turned to me. “His services are invaluable, what he does for our hospitals and clinics. Do you realize every clinic in Chinatown has a computer now? And us—well, before Rocky, how else would we get medicine? Who would negotiate for us, even with other Cubans? Here people do for foreigners—for strangers—what they would not do for their own mothers.”

Just then, Raúl stepped up, the squirming pink piglet in his arms, its unsuspecting mouth turned up. “Beautiful, no?” he asked as we left, bopping his head cheerfully.

There is a terrible joke in Cuba which people perversely insisted on telling me over and over while I was visiting: A global conference is being held on the future for young people. The CNN reporter—all foreign TV reporters in Cuba seem to have morphed into CNN—asks a young Belgian, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The girl says, “A chemist!” The CNN reporter poses the question to a Chinese kid, who says, “An investment banker.” Finally, the CNN reporter asks the Cuban delegate. “Me?” says the boy, inevitably named Pepito. “I want to be a foreigner!”

The joke’s tragedy is not just that it underscores Cuba’s obsequious deference to outsiders in order to survive, but also that it betrays history: Cubans—and my sister’s the proof—have never wanted to be anything but Cuban. Scattered to New York and Madrid, Tampa and Luanda, Miami, Moscow, and Honolulu, they hold onto their Cubanness with audacious caprice.

But bizarrely, in Cuba, I told Rocky, it seemed Cubanness was diminished.

“No, no, no,” she said, annoyed.

“C’mon, it seems like Tom Mahler’s more interested in Cuba, more Cubed than most people here!”

She sighed. “He’s a necessary evil, in spite of his good intentions. And that’s just for now. You’re missing the point. The idea, Malía, is that Cuba not turn into Hawai’i.”

“Hawai’i? Please…there are worse fates.” I was appalled.

And now it was Rocky’s turn to be amused. “Really? Because back in
Hawai’i nee
, hearing you and Mami and Papi, but especially you—with your Hawaiian language classes and your sovereignty speeches and your Pele—Hawai’i isn’t exactly paradise.”

“By comparison? Are you out of your mind?”

“Aren’t you the one who’s always worried that native Hawaiians will be wiped out by development and ‘immigration’ from the mainland? I mean, isn’t that part of the tragedy, that native Hawaiians are already outnumbered in their own land?”

“But Rocky, there are no native Cubans!”

“There are no indigenous, Malía, but what the hell do you think we are? What the hell do you think
I
am?”

As it turned out, the luau came off fairly well. I’d brought spices for the pork, and between Dionisio and Rocky they’d found taro leaves and something they said was a butterfish (it didn’t look quite right to me but Rock swore by it). The Cubans were skeptical, made faces about it, but polished off every last shred of meat nonetheless. We also made lomi lomi salmon and cold mac salad, which didn’t seem to do much for them, but they were knocked out by our fried rice—not Hawaiian or Chinese but a Mercado family recipe that included all of those crazy influences (like huli huli sauce and chorizo). Tom Mahler ate with enthusiasm.