8THEY LIKE THE GRIMY
Maydelis
La Habana, 2015
It isn’t cheating if the marriage is on life support. The only reason we haven’t pulled the plug is inconvenience: scarce housing. (How many couples who hate each other still live under the same roof here, eating silent meals with the TV turned up to fill the space?)
That’s what I tell myself as the man who is not my husband, El Alemán, helps me into the passenger seat, hands me my overnight bag. Jeanette eyes us from the back seat with a knowing smile. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” she whispers as El Alemán walks around to the driver’s side door.
I flash a smile I hope says: Nothing. Everything.
El Alemán squeezes in and pulls the lever at his side. “Goddamn Russian goddamn piece-of-shit cars!” he yells in English as the seat springs back and Jeanette pulls her knees in. “Who’s supposed to fit in this thing?”
“Huh, there’s a cup holder,” Jeanette says pulling down the center partition that does, indeed, hide a cup holder.
“I thought all you guys were supposed to drive those neat 1950s Chevrolets,” El Alemán says. “Why didn’t they give me one of those?”
Jeanette sighs.
“I would have brought my cafecito if I knew there was a cup holder.” She rests an elbow on the center partition.
“Of course there’s a cup holder. What do you think this is? Mars? We’re not that backward.”
Picture it: me and two foreigners. The patience required. Though I’m more amenable to dishing it out for my cousin than for this sunburned, blustering German on holiday. Outside, the valet porters watch us silently. They’re trying to guess the situation, this I know. Two Cuban prostitutes, one tourist? Two tourist relatives and one lucky Cuban family member? A married couple and their hustling tour guide? Porters, I’m trying to figure out the situation.
It’s that sticky, suffocating kind of summer that makes a shower futile. Already I can taste the sweat, the brine in the air. El Alemán circles the driveway of the Hotel Nacional, Jeanette’s hotel—where I stayed last night—and turns where I direct. Then the Malecón zips by: ocean, limestone wall, no waves to temper the heat though that’s not deterring children in their underpants from dangling legs in optimistic anticipation. And two fishermen atop the wall, handmade poles in hand. We are nothing if not a hopeful people.
“Even after being here for a week, it still gets me. Everything crumbling. Everything in ruins.” Jeanette points to a disintegrating apartment, a woman in a head wrap staring blankly in the doorway.
“But a certain romance, no?” El Alemán casts a look at me. “The crumbling. Everything pastel. The ocean, ah, the ocean.”
Any other circumstance and I’d roll my eyes at both of them. But I’ve learned a special kind of patience, a kind of mask, because tourists are easily hurt. I’ve learned it from selling knickknacks to foreigners along the Malecón. Work my husband belittles. Hustle my husband doesn’t see as work. But I make more money than he does, and he is a doctor. That’s why he ridicules me.
What you do is you notice the little details. Like you can tell just from the clothes, you know?
I watch the people on the Malecón as we zoom past. A woman with a small gold cross and three gold rings. Cuban-American, no doubt about it. Back from La Yuma full of gold and jewels trying to impress some folks. They like to hear how hard it is. How it’s gotten worse. Yeah, more apagones, the lights just went out yesterday, you missed it. Have you seen what they’re giving out in the ration bodegas? Real political. Everything political. If they’re real Americanized, I sell them nostalgia, postcards of an old La Habana that existed only in their dreams. I sell them misery in the hopes they give me an extra dollar or two. I gave Jeanette a print of the old Tropicana club in all its glory. “For your mom,” I said.
We pass a young gringo, long hair pulled into a bun. Flip-flops, a seashell necklace, tank top. European. Or La Yuma. Doesn’t matter. That type: he wants to hear about the romance, about how inspiring it is to live here. But here, I have to be a little careful. I have to feel it out. Some just want to hear some Buena Vista Social Club, want to hear about how my grandma met Fidel Castro when he rolled through the city in a victory parade. But some of them, they’re real political the other way. They ask me all these complicated questions, they want to know what’s the real deal in Cuba, like there’s a secret truth. Education (is it really free?), medicine (is it really free?). And they want to hear about santería, so I pretend to practice. They want to hear about how we turn peeling apartments with sinking roofs into salsa dance clubs. I tell them I can take them someplace no tourists ever go. I have to remember, they like the grimy stuff. They don’t want the nice and clean. It’s weird. They buy the Che Guevara prints, the vintage revolution pins. Or they just give me money because they assume I need it—even better. They call me friend.
We turn on Quinta Avenida and line up for the highway. A dozen people stand by the side of the road, waiting on a truck to pick them up. Jeanette sighs dramatically.
And I’m thinking: a jinetera is not a prostitute. Another thing foreigners don’t understand. They think the words are interchangeable. Prostitution would be easy. Prostitution would be in-and-out, collect
