“Don’t you see how he dresses, his fake-diamond earrings?” she says.
“Repartero?” I repeat and she sighs.
I’ve been in Cuba only a week, but I sense she is tiring of me. She spent days guiding me all over La Habana, answering my questions like a mother explaining the basic ways of the world to a child. She has brought me to this tiny town in Camagüey, to the campo, to meet my grandmother, but I sense she’d rather be anywhere else. All she wants to talk about is the United States, what it’s like over there. I do not tell her I have come to visit Cuba because I have nothing left over there. That I am over there’s worst representative.
“A repartero is a kind of person,” Maydelis says. “They dress like reggaeton stars. They have no class, if you know what I mean. They talk bad.”
I do not know what she means, but she lists kinds of people that exist in Cuba—freakies, emos, Mickeys, repas. She lists what they wear and what music they listen to and where they hang out and I realize every country is different but the same. Every country has its own lunch tables. I open the massive ice box, shuffle past slabs of mamey and fruta bomba, cheese wrapped in wet cloth, until my hand reaches a cold Cristal. I can sense Maydelis wants to say more, but I leave her in the kitchen because I am curious about the visitor. I am more curious about the visitor than “kinds of people.”
When I hand the beer to him, my grandmother wiggles in her chair and settles back. The man smiles at me, and my grandmother is not unfriendly but she does not smile.
“I have horses,” the man says to me. His name is Yosmany, he says. “I have two.”
He says it like a question and my grandmother and the man look at me like they expect a response.
“Horses?” I say. The sun is setting and the mosquitoes are out in full force. I slap one on my thigh and it sticks to my skin, a tiny carcass.
“You want to ride one?” Yosmany asks. Something about the way he smiles reminds me of Mario and I feel the familiar gut punch, the craving.
“No,” my grandmother answers for me. “It is dark. She does not want to ride one.”
“But I do,” I say. “I want to ride a horse.”
Yosmany smiles and I want to lick his teeth.
My grandmother takes a long breath and places a hand on the cane that leans against her rocking chair. “Maybe tomorrow.” She turns to Yosmany. “We are busy catching up. I have not known this granddaughter of mine in her twenty-eight years. Plus we go to sleep early.”
“Coño, Abuela,” says Yosmany, and it bothers me that he calls her grandmother, because I have just gained possession of her for the first time. I am not ready to share.
“How’s La Yuma?” Yosmany asks, looking at me. “Is it everything they say?”
I start to answer but my grandmother cuts me off again. Some moments I want her closer, and then my feelings flicker, switch. I grow annoyed. I think of Maydelis’s mom, my tía Elena, saying that all her life my mother acted like she didn’t belong in the family, had been born into a family beneath her. That she spent all her time in her room and often exploded in anger at my grandmother over any little thing. And then I kind of feel it too, that maybe I was wrong to think there was something here for me, a recognizable piece of me.
“I wish this country would become completely capitalist,” my grandmother says as if exhaling smoke. “I wish it would. Then you would see what capitalism really is. You kids, you have no idea because you didn’t see it. You’ll see what it really is.”
“Coño, Abuela,” Yosmany says again.
“I am tired. I’d like to go to bed now.” My grandmother folds her fan in her lap. It depicts colonial scenes, women in hoop skirts and their gallant men.
“Pero don’t get mad, Abuela,” Yosmany says.
When he leaves, my grandmother’s cat Theo jumps onto my lap. He has a piece of lace in his mouth, and she has no idea where it came from.
I stole a lacy thong once. In high school, I walked into a Victoria’s Secret and stuck it in my pocket. The clerk who caught me was named Victoria, which cracked me up. My mother fetched me from a room behind the store, where a security guard lorded over me, eyes on my cleavage. He “let me off easy.”
My mother chastised me with a speech about Cuba. “Do you know,” she said, “that people buy steak from a food vendor on the side of the road? They think it is steak, because it is glossy. It looks juicy.
“Do you know,” she said, “that they bite into the steak and they think, oh, this is a tough steak, and they don’t think, this is a mango peel—they don’t think, this is a mopping rag charred, marinated, blood-orange-soaked, a mopping rag resembling meat. Of course they don’t think this is a mopping rag masquerading as meat.
“Do you know,” she said, “that there are no cats in Cuba? Think about that, Jeanette, no cats. Where do you think all the cats have gone, do you think they just disappeared overnight?
“Jeanette,” she said, “I came here to freedom so you’d never have to steal.”
That is what I am thinking as I pet my grandmother’s cat: I am thinking about a thong. I am thinking about stores and stories and stealing. It is 2015. Things are different in Cuba in 2015. I don’t know if my grandmother ate mopping-rag steak during the Special Period. If that ever even existed. I don’t know if she had another cat when the Soviets fell—what was it, 1989? But it is 2015 now, and my grandmother is round and portentous, nothing like my
