In the morning, I wake before my grandmother and Maydelis and make them coffee. They are amused that a Yumita like me can make good espresso on the disintegrating stovetop. My grandmother gives me seeds for the rooster and chickens and guanajos, and I walk through the dirt spreading the bounty like a flower girl at the altar. Maydelis takes advantage of the hens’ commotion to search for eggs. She tells me she loves it here, a break from La Habana’s commotion. I miss that commotion. I spent only a week in La Habana before arriving to this town with her to visit our grandmother. We fry the eggs, yolks violently red from the ateje seeds.
I tell myself there are more books where Les Misérables came from. I tell myself no one will even notice that one book missing. I tell myself that, really, I am doing my grandmother a favor. She has no idea how valuable those books might be, and moths will surely eat them or hurricanes whip them away. It is a miracle they have survived even this long. I am saving one of the books, ensuring its place in the world, because something so precious needs a place in the world.
When my grandmother notices the book missing, I’ve been in Camagüey for another week. Each day has bled into the next, endless porch rocking, endless walks on dirt roads, endless visits from curious neighbors who, even miles away, learn of my arrival.
My grandmother simply walks into the kitchen one morning as I sit peeling a mamey and says, no hint of anger or emotion, “El negro stole one of my books.”
“What?” I say, a current running through me.
“Les Misérables. I had a book, an original printing of the Spanish version. A rare book worth money.”
I am taken aback though I suppose there is no reason my grandmother shouldn’t know this. I am hit once again, like so many times on this trip, with truth that doesn’t square with my notions of Cuba or Cubans. There is an interest in rare collections! And why shouldn’t there be? I assumed such aesthetic pleasures would not interest Cubans, who surely have more concrete matters to attend to, more utilitarian purchases to pine for, even to notice a valuable antique relic tucked in a dust-engulfed bookshelf. It seems another naïve notion to me now. I feel like a clumsy tourist making sense of a world that feels my own emotionally but clearly is not.
“It is a special book. Something that had been in our family for ages. A gift from my great-grandmother. You know I hid it in the wall for years, that’s how special it is? And now he took it.”
More that I can’t make sense of. Maydelis said that my grandmother found it in the wall. She didn’t say my grandmother was the one who put it there in the first place. Was my grandmother wealthy once, and had she wanted to leave too? It doesn’t square with her politics. Nothing makes sense.
“Why would you assume he took it, Abuela?” I say, sliding the blunt knife away from me and placing the mamey on the table.
“Who else?” she says. “Yesterday I went to the bathroom and nobody watched him in the living room. That negro knows more than you’d think looking at him.”
Maydelis comes in with a plastic bag of bread my grandmother sent for from a neighbor who works at a bakery. She looks at both our faces and sets the bag down. Sweat has formed an outline of her spine through her tank top. She asks what’s going on and my grandmother repeats her accusation. Maydelis’s eyes shift to me and I look down at the fruit on the table. My heart races. I feel cold even as I sit in the unmoving hot air.
“I will report him,” my grandmother says. “I will report him to the Comité. I will report him to his workplace. I will even call the police.”
“Wait, wait,” Maydelis says. “Let me talk to him first.”
“Are you out of your mind?” My grandmother places a hand on the table to steady herself. She breathes hard.
“Sit,” I say, getting up and guiding my grandmother toward my chair. I still don’t dare look at Maydelis.
“I—think I can reason with him, Abuela. I won’t go alone,” Maydelis says. “Jeanette will go with me. Let us try that first at least.”
“You can’t trust people like that,” my grandmother says, placing a hand over the knife I have discarded. “If they don’t do it on the way in, they do it on the way out.”
I have heard that racist Cuban expression from my mother so many times.
My grandmother turns to face me. “Do you see what Cuba is becoming?”
I decide to avoid Maydelis until the moment of our walk to Yosmany’s house. I wonder if she really intends to go, or if she plans to confront me. For hours I hole up in my room and pretend to nap. I creep to the door to listen for bits of conversation but I hear nothing about the book or about the neighbor. When I do leave the bedroom, there is no one in the hall.
So I slip the book from my bag and place it back on the bookshelf in its original enclosure, where two books now slant toward the void. I consider saying I just borrowed it, I wanted to read it, but it’s too late for that. Besides, my grandmother and Maydelis know I can barely read Spanish.
I scour my hands as if I can wash away the ugliness eating at me. I scrub and scrub until my hands are raw, and I
