“Will you tell her?” Maydelis asks.
One thing I notice: fewer women in Cuba wear makeup. Some women preen in jewelry and heels, sequins and bangles, and a bare face. Not all, but many. It is too hot, probably. But I am not here to draw conclusions or take answers home. I know everyone will say in Miami, Tell me about Cuba. Most of them expecting an answer like, It is hell on earth. Or maybe a few, subversively, will ask me expecting an answer like, It is socialist paradise. I’d rather answer with a question, Tell me about the United States?
“It’s complicated,” I say.
“So sad,” Abuela says.
So my mother hates her mother. There are times I thought I hated my mother, so I understand, though I wonder if only politics divided them. I grew up in Miami, yes, and watched family dinners devolve into all-out brawls over mere mention of Cuba-anything, but I am as uninterested in the familiar arguments as my cousin Maydelis, also my age. We grew up on opposite shores but equally drenched in the political, in living everything through the context of a country miles away. I understand her fatigue. I, too, am tired.
Maydelis and I stay up talking after my grandmother has gone to bed. We sit on plastic chairs in the hallway, which is lined with sepia photos and a termite-ridden bookcase that holds ancient-looking hardcover books. They’d be at home in any grand library, the kind where rolling ladders reach the highest volumes and portraits of old dead white men line the walls.
I ask Maydelis about the books and she shrugs, says, “They’re just books.” But I pick one up and then another, amazed at their fragility. The two oldest-looking ones are enclosed in plastic. I take one out of its wrapping and marvel at the crinkling, disintegrating pages. CECILIA VALDÉS, O LA LOMA DEL ÁNGEL, reads the cover in embossed, faded gold. CIRILO VILLAVERDE. I flip the yellowed pages carefully until I find the date of printing: 1839. I gasp. Maydelis barely looks over.
The next is Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, a Spanish translation. It is harder to find a date in that one but from the delicate, humidity-beaten pages, the type so faded it is barely legible, it’s obvious that the book could be a contemporary to Cecilia Valdés. I flip its pages and notice something scrawled in the margin, in black ink turned wispy gray, ornate script. I bring my face closer but can make out only the last word, fuerza. Force.
I’ve been sober almost a year—fuck whoever says Suboxone doesn’t count—but still find myself making calculations like How much Oxy could I buy if I sold an antique book, a rare collectible? But then I remember that even if I’m not getting high, I still need money. Money my mother won’t give me anymore. Money my temp jobs hardly pay me. My mother would pay for a trip to Cuba but wouldn’t see me to the airport. My mother would pay for a trip to Cuba but would check my eyes each time I said I needed help buying groceries.
“Maydelis, these are incredible. Where did they come from?” I ask her.
“They were in the wall.”
I stare at her.
“Abuela found them in the walls of the house—twenty years ago, I’m talking about—when she was expanding the house.”
I have heard this rumor, about valuable artifacts hiding behind the innocuous-looking plaster of homes all over Cuba, though I’ve heard only of jewels, gold, old bills now worthless; I’ve never heard of old books hidden in the walls. I have also, perhaps, assumed the story was just another exaggeration, another drama-seeped tale from my mother.
My mother’s story was that in the 1950s and ’60s, when wealthy Cuban families plotted escape from the revolution, they sometimes hid their valuables in the walls of their homes. Back then, these wealthy families expected the revolution to fail—a year or two sunbathing in Miami, a year or two playing dominoes and staring at the ocean. Some later immigrants were allowed to leave the country with only two changes of clothing and three pairs of underwear. That was my mother.
Any money or jewelry left behind, which the families were forbidden to take out of the country, would become property of the state. But these families, expecting to return to the island soon enough to reclaim their property and resume their wealthy lives, buried treasure in their sprawling yards, hid jewels in the foundation of their mansions, stacked cash beneath the floorboards. There were stories of some of these once-opulent homes in those once-elite neighborhoods of La Habana crumbling to ruins around the families now living in them, families whose bad luck turned once they saw sparkling rubies and sapphires beckoning in the rubble.
“Maydelis, this is incredible,” I say once more.
“I know,” she says, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s incredible at all.
I steal the book in the middle of the night. My grandmother and Maydelis are asleep. Crickets chirp and flies buzz in and out of the wooden-slat windows. So easy. I tiptoe through the hallway, grab Les Misérables off the shelf, take it to my room, and tuck it into a corner of my gusano beneath some shirts.
In the confines of the room—my grandmother’s room, which she has given up for me, the visitor—I lie spread-eagle and watch the blades of a painfully slow fan waltz above me. I tell myself it is okay, no one will notice, that someday I will be in a better financial position and I will come back to Cuba. I will give my grandmother, my cousin, all my family whatever money the book was worth times a hundred. I wonder what an antiques dealer might pay for a rare book, how many bills that money might cover, how much rent, how many nights without sweat rolling
