“You have a better idea?” I say to El Alemán. His face is turning red, redder than its natural red.
I see Jeanette shift in her seat and bite a nail. She eyes El Alemán and then looks at me like she’s trying to communicate something with her eyes. Her lips curl.
“Tell the Black one to go himself,” El Alemán says. “Tell him to call a mechanic. Tell that worthless thief I’ll give him a dollar and that’s all he’s getting from me.”
Now Jeanette opens the door and comes to stand beside me. “Qué comemierda este viejo,” she says in accented Spanish, and I try to stifle a laugh.
“You’re going with her?” El Alemán says. “Well, I guess I’m the only one who values my life.”
Jeanette ignores him. She takes my elbow as she did in the sugarcane field, only she’s gripping me harder now. We start walking toward the cafetería.
The men have gone back to their baseball game. The whole town is silent, so different from La Habana. The only sound is the drone of the television.
“You really don’t think someone did something to the car?” she asks when we’re out of earshot.
“No,” I say. “That’s not how it works.”
“How what works?”
“You make friends, not enemies, if what you’re after is money.”
“The Black one,” it turns out, has a name. Reinaldo. He offers to take us to señora Lilia’s house to use the phone. He walks with a long gait, arms swinging at his side, periodically wiping his face with a corner of his yellowed tank top and exposing his belly to us. He knows everyone we pass, and they yell greetings to one another. Some people ask him point-blank: Who are they? Why are they here?
I notice a change in Jeanette when El Alemán isn’t with us. She slips more easily into Spanish, seems to swing her hips a little more loosely. She snaps back at the men who catcall with empty, bored faces, throws curses and friendly jabs right back at Reinaldo. I settle, relieved, into the role of participant, no longer the guide.
“But what’s the problem, though?” Reinaldo says to Jeanette.
“Coño, how am I supposed to know? It just doesn’t start.”
“Pssssh,” Reinaldo says through his teeth, gnashing on a cigar.
I feel the buzz of a mosquito at my neck and hope they won’t make a feast of us by the time we leave. We turn right, following Reinaldo, onto a dirt path that runs between two Soviet-era complexes. Laundry swings from window to window, flapping in the dust, and chickens wander in and out of the building’s entryway. I can see a couple faces through the iron bars of the windows.
“Why you wanna go with that viejo anyway?” Reinaldo says in my direction, but still looking at Jeanette. “You take me, I’ll show you a good time. Got my own car and everything.”
Jeanette starts to say something but I cut her off. “You gonna pay for the hotel?”
“Psssh,” Reinaldo says again.
Once, Ronny and I went on vacation, staying at a beach house in Santa María del Mar, a reward from his boss for the best doctors. The house itself was falling apart. All night I heard mice skittering along the walls and huge palmetto bugs flying in and out through holes along the baseboards. The beach, too, was far less appealing than the tourist beaches, which in those days were still off-limits to Cubans like us: murky water, garbage along the shore.
But Santa María del Mar is still my favorite memory of the two of us. Just an hour from home, we were unfamiliar friends again, hand in hand, sleeping naked in bed to escape the heat, the slow ceiling fan whipping my long hair over his chest in a steady, slow rhythm. This is how most relationships must end, I think. Slow and without drama or pandemonium, without reason: just two people who become accessories to the bland survival of the everyday.
When we returned to La Habana, a leak had ripped a chunk of plaster from the ceiling and it took us months to find the money and materials to fix it. Meanwhile there were buckets to catch water each time it rained and we stopped speaking of the nonessential. We wrote for money from Jeanette’s mom in Miami to fix the hole in the ceiling. Then the sky was gone, and the house was dark again.
We get to the house with the phone. It’s a squat, corrugated-roof hut surrounded by identical ones. There is a concrete porch, where an old woman with dark sunspots sits on a rocking chair, fanning herself. Bougainvillea vines snake around the house and blossom out into the sun.
“Señora Lilia,” Reinaldo says.
The woman smiles and smooths her white hair. She introduces herself when I hand over a few coins for the phone call.
Jeanette offers to pay but she’s carrying only divisa, not moneda nacional. Constantly she complains about the unfairness of the double-currency system, about how mad she feels paying a commission to exchange dollars into CUCs. There seem so many other easy injustices to point to; I’m frequently amused by what catches her fancy.
In Lilia’s stuffy living room, packed to the brim with trinkets and religious figures, I dial the number on the rental car contract while Jeanette sits on the porch, smoking a cigarette with Reinaldo and pretending she doesn’t notice him creeping in, flirtatious, going for the foreign kill. I watch them through the wooden slats filtering dusty light into Lilia’s tiny living room. The whirr of a refrigerator reaches all the way to me, and I can’t hear what Reinaldo and Jeanette are saying outside. The sheets hanging in place of doors inside the house rustle with a sudden breeze.
The rental agency, unsurprisingly, is less than helpful. It will take them hours, maybe four or five, says the high-pitched woman on the other end of the line. They don’t have anyone, she explains, anywhere near us. She shouts questions at other people in the
