Next Year in Havana(77)
The line between hero and villain is a precariously fragile one.
“I’m sorry he died,” Luis says. “That you weren’t able to find him like you wanted.”
“Me, too.”
This is it. There are no more answers to be found, only questions. I will never have a chance to know the man whose blood runs through my veins. This part of my family is gone now, too, just like my grandmother.
When I was searching for her lover, there was still hope, a sense of purpose to my trip here beyond finding her final resting place. Now there’s just the unknown, and of course, the uncertainty of my relationship with Luis.
He brings our joined fingers to his lips, kissing my knuckles. “Everything is going to be okay,” he says, as though he can read the thoughts going through my mind.
“Will it?”
“Ojalá.”
I smile, the spirit behind the word something so quintessentially Cuban, something incrementally beyond hope that exists entirely out of our hands.
“This means something to me, Marisol,” Luis says, echoing his earlier words in the hotel elevator.
A little crack forms over my heart. “This means something to me, too.”
I spend the rest of the drive back to Havana with Luis’s arm wrapped around my shoulders, his lips occasionally brushing my temple, our legs pressed against each other, studying his profile.
“Let’s go out tonight,” he suggests as we near the city. “Let’s do something to take your mind off all of this.”
“Like a date?”
He laughs. “Yes, a proper date. Somewhere along the way we’ve gotten things turned around a bit. I’ll pick you up and take you to dinner—nothing fancy, but I promise the food will be perfection.” He winks at me. “I happen to know a few good paladares. Afterward, we can go dancing.”
I grin. “You dance?”
Somehow I can’t quite imagine formal, slightly serious Luis dancing. Then again—
“Occasionally,” he says with a small smile. “Don’t tell anyone, but my grandmother taught me when I was a very little boy.”
“Mine, too. She used to play old records in her living room, and we’d dance together. I was terrible at first,” I confess.
“And now?” he teases.
“I have a few moves.”
“I’m even more intrigued. I need to help my grandmother get ready for the dinner service since I missed yesterday, but perhaps we can go out afterward?”
“I would love that.”
* * *
? ? ?
When we arrive back at the house, we part ways, and I set my bag down in my bedroom and head to the heart of the house—the kitchen—where Ana is preparing dinner for the paladar’s guests.
She smiles when she sees me.
“How was your trip?” she asks, greeting me with a kiss on the cheek.
“Beautiful,” I answer. I’m not ready to tell her what we learned from Magda, am still processing the news myself. “Can I help you prepare dinner?”
Ana waves me off with a cluck of her tongue. “No, no. I have it. It’s almost done. We have paella today.”
I can smell it, the aroma of yellow rice and seafood filling the tiny space. She has the same style of enormous pan my grandmother used to cook her paella sitting on top of the stove.
“How do you decide the menu each day?” I ask.
“It depends on what I can get at the market. If I can find chicken that day, we eat arroz con pollo. If they have seafood, I make a paella. We’re limited by the shortages, of course, but we make do.”
“That has to be challenging.”
She smiles. “I like a bit of a challenge. It helps me to be creative with the menu, and it keeps the guests happy because there’s always variety. It’s not an easy business; when the government opened the paladar system, many tried and many failed. The taxes and license fees can bankrupt you. Not to mention, you can create a menu only to have it fail miserably when you can’t find the ingredients. You can spend days searching for something as simple as eggs or milk.
“Many of our guests, the tourists who come, don’t understand the challenges we face. They judge our restaurants by the standards they are used to in their home countries, but we make do with Cuban ingenuity.”
She winks at me.
“It doesn’t hurt that we have Luis playing ‘La Bayamesa’ on the saxophone. We hang the photos my husband took in the revolution’s early days on the wall, serve our guests on what’s left of my grandmother’s finest china. They come here for the romantic Cuban experience, and we give it to them.”
Was that what I came here for? The “romantic Cuban experience”? I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’d had an image in my mind of what it would be like here. I’d told myself I’d be open-minded, that I wouldn’t let the stories I’d heard, my family’s perspective of exile, cloud my impressions of the real Cuba. I’d been convinced I’d find two narratives here—ours and theirs, and that the truth would lie somewhere in between. But I didn’t realize how bad it would be. In all the discussions of opening relations with Cuba, of eradicating the embargo, the focus has always been on the island as a tourist paradise, perpetually frozen in time. I didn’t realize how much people still suffered, didn’t understand the depth and breadth of the problems facing everyday Cubans.