Next Year in Havana(10)
I dress quickly, struggling a bit with the tiny buttons in the back. Once the dress is on, I choose a pair of earrings from the wooden vanity in the corner of my bedroom, staring at my reflection in the three-way mirror perched on top of it. I select one of the glass bottles sitting atop the surface, spritzing the perfume on my wrists, rubbing it behind my ears, the scent one I save for special occasions.
“Are you ready?” my sister Isabel hisses from the doorway, her gaze drifting toward the hallway. None of the servants are likely to tell on us, but Magda’s the unknown; our nanny is more family than anything else, nearly as concerned with the reputation of the Perez family as our mother is. This isn’t the type of party we normally attend, like all the ones where we stand in full-skirted ball gowns and long white gloves wearing heavy diamond necklaces around our necks.
My brow rises as I take stock of Isabel’s outfit; clearly I’m not the only one who raided our mother’s closet. The dress is one our mother has worn to parties before—black, fitted, and far more daring than anything she’s ever allowed any of us to wear. If this is Isabel’s choice for the evening, I can only imagine what Beatriz has come up with.
“I’m ready.” I pick up my clutch from the dresser, my fingers stroking the beads.
“Where’s Beatriz?” I ask, careful to keep my voice low. Magda has the uncanny ability to sneak up on us at the most inopportune moments, a lesson Maria has learned more than anyone else; being the youngest has its drawbacks.
“Waiting in the car.”
The car was another battle with our mother, one Beatriz ultimately won.
Isabel’s gaze darts toward the hallway and back again.
“And Maria?” I ask.
“Sleeping.”
Keeping our outing a secret from our little sister is as crucial as hiding it from Magda. Maria has bribery down to an art form President Batista would envy, and the price for ensuring her silence for not telling our parents we’re attending a party would likely be steeper than we would want to pay. The last time Maria caught Isabel sneaking back into the house after a date, she made out with Isabel’s favorite pearl earrings and a dress from Paris.
I follow Isabel down the hallway, our heels drumming against the marble floors. Our house was built in the mid-eighteenth century by the first Perez ancestor of note, a French corsair who amassed a fortune through ill-gotten gains and won himself a wife of impeccable lineage. He built her one of the largest and most ostentatious mansions in Havana, one that’s been renovated and updated throughout the years by various Perez heirs. The end result is a cavernous mansion brimming with gold leaf and marble. I’ve always thought the corsair had more money than taste, but considering he won himself a title from a Bourbon king along with his bride, he possessed enough cachet for our mother to proudly claim him as an ancestor.
In the beginning, our legacy came from smuggling and the corsair’s more nefarious activities. Soon his children and grandchildren began diversifying the family’s fortune, and through an advantageous marriage in the late nineteenth century, the Perezes became sugar barons.
For better, worse, and the truly horrific, sugar has molded Cuba’s fortunes.
The corsair stares us down as we tiptoe through the hall, and while the rest of our ancestors seem to disapprove of this act of rebellion from atop their oil-and-canvas perches, I fancy that our pirate ancestor with his dark hair and even darker eyes twinkling with mischief would have wholeheartedly approved.
We slip our shoes off at the top of the staircase in an act of choreographed sisterly precision. The marble is cool against my toes despite the warm air tonight, the moon casting a sliver of light across the steps. We freeze as noises coming from the general direction of the kitchen filter throughout the house.
Is the risk we’re taking really worth the reward of a night of freedom?
The punishment? Temporary removal to the country. Forced attendance at teas and luncheons, parties where we’re jettisoned from one eligible son of one of our father’s business associates to another. Life as usual.
They’re fighting in Cuba’s eastern provinces, in the Oriente, boys not much older than me, boys who should be at university—who would be at university if Batista hadn’t closed the University of Havana out of fear years ago. The revolutionaries are fighting throughout the country, storming the Presidential Palace, seeking to overthrow the government, to end Batista’s corruption, and yet, behind the high walls of our Miramar home, the ancien régime reigns supreme. My mother has no time for revolutions; they wreak havoc with her balls and teas.
It is a strange time to be Cuban, to feel the stirrings beneath your feet, hear the rumblings in the sky, and to continue on as though nothing is happening at all. Stranger still to be a woman in Cuba—we vote, but what does a vote mean when election outcomes are a foregone conclusion? The women in our family attended the best schools, grew up with a slew of tutors, each one more harried and harassed by all of us—Beatriz, in particular—but Perez women do not work no matter how much we might wish to do so. We are useless birds in a gilded cage while our countrywomen serve in the government, while some plot revolution. Times have changed in our little island, a tinder lit, spreading like wildfire throughout Cuba, meanwhile our estates are a bulwark against modernization, change, freedom.
And so occasionally, we do exceedingly foolish things like sneaking out of the house in the dead of night, because it’s impossible to stand near the flame consuming everything around you and not have some of that fire catch the hem of your skirt, too.