Sofrito. Phillippe Diederich
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had these strange memories. I was a little kid. And then there was something about my father. I can’t remember them exactly, but it made me happy.”
Marisol buried her face in the pillow. “You’ll think I’m silly.”
“Please.” He caressed her hair. “I want to know. It means a lot to me.”
She turned. The light from the opening in the curtains cut like a line across the side of her face. “I was thinking of butterflies,” she said. “Many beautiful butterfiles of all colors flying in the air. They could fly anywhere they wanted and were so pretty, Frank. It made me feel very—I don’t know—relaxed.”
“Butterflies, really?”
She looked away. “Silly, no?”
“No. Of course not.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.
“When I was little,” she said, and bit her lower lip, “my mother had a flower garden behind the house. My sister Mayelin—the one who went to Spain—my little brother and my cousin and I used to lay face up on the ground in the garden. We’d stay very still. If we were patient, the butterflies would land on us. We used to make a contest of it to see who could have the most butterflies land on them. We imagined that the more butterflies landed on you, the more people loved you.”
He caressed her cheek. “I bet you won every time.”
She forced a laugh, and her eyes stared at the empty space between them. “Then everything changed. My mother had to take a job and my father built a room over the garden for my grandparents. My aunt who had left for La Habana came back to Cienfuegos to live with us. The garden became a tiny patio where we raised chickens and pigs and grew vegetables. Flowers and butterflies were, sabes, unessential.”
Frank glanced away at the ripples in the sheet along her legs, afraid of the intimacy her words offered him.
“That’s how it is here,” she said. “Anything that is beautiful is destroyed for the sake of what is practical. With Fidel, it’s always sacrifice, sacrifice, and more sacrifice. We’ve become a country without beauty. We have only what is essential. And sometimes not even that.”
“It’s a shame,” he said quietly, but it felt cheap and insincere. He wanted to say more, do more, but he didn’t know how.
Marisol dropped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “In Cuba, the government tells us what is beautiful and what is essential.”
Frank turned away and clenched his jaw.
She closed her eyes. “The thing is, I don’t think I’ve seen colors in my dreams since I was seven years old.”
He had no words. He gently brushed a strand of hair from her face and curled it behind her ear the way she’d done at the restaurant.
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For all this. For taking me away for a night and reminding me that there is beauty in the world. It gives me hope.”
He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, his hand moving softly over her breast.
“Ay, Frank.” She turned away and covered herself with the bedsheet. “Qué coqueto. And so early in the morning.”
They took a table at the patio bar and ordered coffee. In the light of the tropical morning, the cracks began to show. The fountain in the patio was out of order. The bartender appeared tired and detached. The hotel security guard carried his permanent frown from one side of the lobby to the other. The noise of trucks, car horns, children crying, men and women arguing filtered through the cracks in the building. In the morning, Havana was not so different from New York.
Frank drank his coffee in a few quick sips. He was invigorated. It was as if he’d finally been cleansed of something that had been polluting him for years. He took a quick inventory of the lobby and excused himself. When he stood, Marisol grabbed his hand. “Are you coming back?”
“Claro, I’m just going to make a phone call.”
“Frank…”
“Oh.” He pulled out his wallet and counted a few bills.
Her eyes, like he had known them, faded away and came back with the venom of the previous night. “That’s not what I meant.”
“¿Entonces?”
“I just didn’t want you to leave me alone. The security will kick me out if they don’t see me sitting with a guest.”
Two security guards were talking by the elevators. He glanced at the telephones on the other side of the lobby. “I’ll be right there. If anyone says anything, tell them to come talk to me.”
He stood by the telephones and looked around. Marisol was talking with a waiter. An official looking man with a thin mustache walked toward him. He turned away hoping to avoid eye contact.
He waited.
When he looked up again, their eyes met for an instant.
Frank turned to face the wall and waited until the man had passed and there was a good distance between them. Then he picked up the receiver and gave the operator Justo’s brother’s number. It was more of the same. Nothing.
He rejoined Marisol at the patio. She was working on her second cup of coffee. “Do you know where Centro Habana is?”
Marisol laughed and waved her arm. “All this is Centro Habana, from here, that way until you get to Vedado.”
“I need to find a place.” He waved to the waiter and ordered another coffee.
“If you like I can come with you. I can be your guide.” Marisol ran the tip of her index finger around the inside wall of the empty coffee cup, then placed it in her mouth. When she looked up, Frank was staring at her.
“Coño.” She shrugged. “So I love coffee.”
5
“When I make tostones, I press the plantain so it’s flat. Then I fry it in oil, but I allow a small bit in the center to remain uncooked so they won’t get too dry. It also gives them a more pleasant texture.”
—María Ramírez de la Garza
cook at La Tropical restaurant on Calle Ocho, The Miami Herald, 1995.
The city of Havana was covered in a thin haze. Everything was gray. The buildings, the street, the cars, the sidewalk, even the people carried an overcast texture that was drab and without color. But slowly, hues introduced themselves in a yellow dress, a flower print shirt, a red ‘57 Chevy convertible decorated with pink and white balloons parked in front of El Palacio de los Matrimonios.
Frank took Marisol’s hand. They walked down Prado’s center esplanades to the Malecón where a melancholy ocean shifted in a dark, metallic monochrome. Fishermen casting their lines sat on inner tubes that bobbed up and down with the tide of silver waves. East of the city, a long streak of dark smoke rose from the refinery and stretched like a shoelace across the sky.
The avenue was flanked by a long row of faded pastel buildings, their tattered facades held in place by skeletons of two-by-fours and scaffoldings that looked as old and delicate as the buildings. And behind them, more buildings rose, each a tone grayer than the next, their own forgotten histories buried deep within apartments that were separated into rooms, which were divided into smaller rooms by makeshift walls of wood and cloth sheets.
They crossed the avenue and made their way into the grid of streets and buildings that rose three, five, sometimes eight stories high, their facades covered in smog and soot from bad gasoline and dust from the crumbling of the city. The rooftops were littered with television antennas and small homemade satellite dishes put together from recycled oilcans and wire mesh. The balconies were dressed in drying laundry and potted plants that desperately reached out for the Caribbean sun. Women