CHAPTER 16

THE RIDE FROM THE AIRPORT WITH NENA was terrific. It was so wonderful just to be with her, to feel her close by. Nena looked great too: brown and firm, her eyes bright and her hair a luscious, wavy black. When I saw her at the airport, I was momentarily taken aback: She was so beautiful. Could we really be from the same gene pool?

We rushed out to her new red Mazda Navajo truck that I would have never imagined my sister driving. We dashed from the air-conditioned terminal through the humid tunnel of cars and vans spewing exhaust to her big truck sitting in a fire lane, a ticket flapping under the wipers. She grabbed it and cavalierly threw it into the back seat, where it joined what appeared to be a collection of tickets. I was struck by what an unlikely act that was for her, so free and optimistic. Then Nena sealed us in with a touch of a button, immediately cranked on the AC and strapped on a pair of mean-looking sunglasses. With a flick of her hand, she had bouncy reggae coming from the speakers. As she drove along, she sang with the music, perky and alive. This was my sister?

Within seconds we were on the long, curling freeway, speeding toward her place. While Nena chatted it up with me about how happy she was to see me, and how I didn’t look bad at all considering the circumstances, I stared out through the greentinted glass at the tall palmettos, the huge American cars honking and cutting each other off, and the unending landscape of new apartment buildings and shiny strip malls. Everything was so bright, images came through bursts of white. I’d forgotten my sunglasses and squinting so much was giving me a headache.

“God, isn’t anything old in Miami?” I asked as we passed yet one more new glaring glass-surfaced building.

“No, there aren’t even old Jewish retirees in Miami Beach anymore,” she said. “It’s all Miami Vice, European models and Gloria Estefan’s restaurant.”

Everyone talks about the flatness of the Midwest, but Miami makes Chicago look like the rolling hills of San Francisco. Miami is an arid pancake with splashes of neon, even in daylight. And because of the swamps underneath, there’s not much height to the construction, so the city has a kind of stunted look to it.

“Welcome to Havana, U.S.A,” Nena joked.

“No way, no way!” I protested. “Hey, I’ve seen photos—there’s no way Havana’s this ugly!” And I’ve heard, I thought to myself, not just from Patricia, but from Gina and her friends: Cuba’s green and lush and majestic, no matter how badly it may be crumbling. Te quiero verde, I remembered.

This looked like as good a time as any to tell her—about my proposed trip to Cuba, about what actually happened between Gina and me. I was thinking at the very least it was a good setup, it would create context and make it easier to explain later. But just as I was getting my story together, just as I was rehearsing it in my head, Nena pulled abruptly off the road.

“Listen,” she said, suddenly so serious it was frightening. She kept her sunglasses on, making eye contact nearly impossible. “We’ve got to talk.” The engine was still running. The air was blowing ice cold. I felt myself shiver.

“Okay,” I said. But this wasn’t how I wanted to do it. I’d hoped it would be more casual, even if it was in the car, but not in this hermetically-sealed silence stopped dead at the side of the freeway. I glanced over my shoulder, afraid a state trooper might drive up and ask if there was trouble. I was convinced there were warrants out for me somewhere, somehow.

“Anything wrong?” Nena asked. I shook my head. She took her glasses off. “Okay, listen, I mean…you probably know…”

“Know what?” I was jumpy again, sweat on my upper lip. I felt the way, I’m sure, bombing fugitives from the sixties must feel when, even after a lifetime of peaceful underground exile with good deeds and community work in the peace and hunger movements, they’re finally caught. Even if all that turns out to be worthless and they draw a twenty-year sentence, at least they can be themselves, sign their real names to letters, make phone calls, and beg for forgiveness. It had only been a month or so for me but it already weighed in as a lifetime. I was ready to give up, relieved to surrender.

Nena looked at me. “Give me a chance, okay?” She took a deep breath, then bit her nail.

It was then I realized Nena was far more nervous than I was. She didn’t know my secret, didn’t even suspect it. As I stared at her, I realized Nena’s eyes were red, tears brimming. Whatever the secret was, it was hers.

“Nena, what’s going on?” I was scared. I reached over to touch her, to hold her, but she started laughing.

“God, Juani, you really don’t know, do you?”

“Know what? Know what?”

She pulled me to her, laughing into my shoulder and wiping her tears with her wrists. “I’m in love! I’m in love! I’m in love!” she shouted, pulling away, her face flushed. “And it’s incredible!”

I know I had a huge grin on my face. I was happy for her, of course. “When did this happen? Who is he?” I asked. “What’s his name? Does he love you too?” I had so many questions—Nena in love! This was big news, huge news! Nena had dated, she’d had quite a few admirers, but she’d never been seriously interested in anybody, much less in love.

“His name is Bernie, Bernie Beck,” she said, “and, yes, he loves me too, he loves me very much.”

“He’s Jewish,” I said, registering the name. “Well, Patricia and Ira will get a kick out of that. You guys can start a support group for Cubans and Jews who love each other.”

She was supposed to laugh but Nena got a little quiet instead. “Yeah, something like that,” she said, then stopped, but it felt unfinished, like a pause instead of a period. “Bernie’s half Jewish…”

“Yeah?”

Nena sighed. “Listen, Juani, he’s a great guy,” she said. The air got heavy again. I was getting cold, really cold.

“Of course, if you love him, he must be,” I said, but I had no idea where we were going now.

“Yeah, I’m crazy about him,” she said.

Traffic was whipping by. I was sure we were begging for trouble just sitting on the shoulder of the freeway. If not the cops, then a carjacker, a rapist, something awful for sure. “Nena, I want to hear all about him—what he does, how you met, everything,” I said. “But can we go somewhere? Anywhere, really—your place, a coffee shop, a park, whatever. I want to be able to savor this a little, okay?”

But Nena was still. She stared out to the freeway blurred by the traffic and heat and reached across the seat to touch my thigh. “He’s black,” she said.

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “So?”

Nena turned back to me, grinning. “And he’s gorgeous,” she said, pulling the car into gear.

“Mami’s gonna die,” I said as we dove into traffic, both of us laughing all the while.

As it turned out, Bernie was amazing. The son of a Jewish literature professor at NYU and a black Puerto Rican poet I recognized—Amparo Maure, who wrote Plena Voz, a classic of modern independentista literature. He was a handsome, chocolate-colored man with an easy smile and dreds down to his waist.

“You really know my mother’s work?” he asked, surprised and pleased when Nena introduced us.

I spouted back a few lines I’d learned from Gina and her friends. Bernie was impressed: He clapped his hands and hugged me close. His body was warm and he smelled naturally sweet. “I love you already,” he said, all smiles, laughing it up.

His mother, it turned out, is a lesbian. His parents divorced long ago but they’re friendly, like Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida (I remember thinking, It must be a New York thing…) so he was pretty unfazed about me. But, as much as Gina and her independentista pals yakked up Amparo Maure, they’d never mentioned a word to me about her sexuality.

“Yeah, well, the independentista movement doesn’t do well with lesbian and gay issues,” Bernie said over a dinner he’d cooked in my honor: pumpkin tortellini in a white cream sauce with nutmeg, cold shrimp in some sort of spicy mango chutney. “They’re in solidarity with everybody but gay people. They’re like Spartacists—they’re not anti-gay per se, they just think homosexuality’s a product of a capitalist society. As soon as the revolution comes, men will stop being narcissistic, which will put an end to male homosexuality. And they’ll stop being sexist, which will dampen lesbian ardor, since, obviously, women only turn to women ‘cause men are dogs, right?”

Bernie laughed. He had a great laugh, deep and robust, and he squinted his eyes when he smiled. He and Nena were constantly giggling, gazing at each other, and touching. I’d never seen her like this in my life. It was wild to watch my normally tense and serious sister so playful and happy, as carefree as a co-ed during the first few days of school.

Apparently, they met days after Nena moved to Miami. Bernie was a bicycle messenger running a package to her office and he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her. It was love at first sight, they both say. Within a week, they were living together in an old warehouse off Biscayne Boulevard. Bernie and some friends had converted it into a fairly livable loft. Although it wasn’t air-conditioned, the concrete and the breeze off the bay kept it pretty cool. There they’d set up house, a rehearsal space for Bernie’s band (Garvey Way, the tape Nena had popped on in the car; they play everything from reggae to souk, salsa to soca), and a bank of computers from which Bernie and his pal George run the messenger service. That explained the half dozen bicycles which hung from hooks in the ceiling. Both he and George still pedal now and again, Bernie explained, because they cover emergencies, it keeps them in shape, and helps them stay on top of what clients think as well as what the messengers actually have to put up with.

“It was total luck he ran the delivery that day we met,” Nena said, laughing.

“Nah, not luck,” said Bernie, beaming at her, “fate—it was fate.” He reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

Watching them together, I was really happy for Nena. But their unabashed love only underscored the emptiness in my own life. I felt ugly and envious. And miserably alone.

I stayed with Nena and Bernie for a few days before I decided to go down to Key West. It was sweet to be around them, but suffocating. Besides, I wasn’t getting any time with Nena. There didn’t seem to be even five minutes to say anything about Gina, or to tell her I’d met Ali and what I was thinking about him and Pauli. Bernie was always around, working with his partner George or at the computer, rehearsing with his band, or cooking for us. The guy couldn’t seem to stop chopping and blending, sautéing and blackening. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, but I just didn’t know him that well—and I wasn’t used to Nena having a lover. I wasn’t used to not having her all to myself whenever I wanted.

I borrowed Nena’s truck and sped down south, to the one place in the U.S. where, on a clear night, you can see Havana. In Key West, I rented a room at a gay guesthouse where I was one of only two women in the entire place. The rest of the clientele were sinewy red-skinned men from up north who wore tiny Speedos to show off their equipment. The guesthouse used pink napkins, pink towels, pink curtains—they played up the faggy stuff just for fun. I hung out by the pool, drank mojitos (the Cuban influence was still very intense), played dominos at the pier, went to Hemingway’s house, and checked out the places where José Martí used to talk to Cuban cigar workers back in the 1800s.

Even though I’d brought a bathing suit, I couldn’t get it together to go to the beach; it seemed too much like pleasure and I was sure I didn’t deserve any of that yet. Besides, I was convinced I still looked like an accident victim, no matter how much Bernie and Nena had assured me to the contrary, so my attitude was to keep my body covered. Even by the pool, I stayed in my clothes, ordering drinks from the bar and reading, writing in my journal now that my arm didn’t seem to pull on my chest muscles so much anymore.

In the last month, my journal had become a nightmare. Not writing about “the incident” right away had been a terrible mistake. Now, every time I began to jot down my story, it got confused with Jimmy’s mess. I’d be right at the place where I hit Gina when suddenly, I’d look down at the page in horror: And then the guy grabbed the chair and hit Gina in the back, like on a TV show. And the chair broke into pieces, so I grabbed a leg to defend myself and sparred with the guy. But I knew that wasn’t what happened! Or was it?

I’d flip through the pages and find this: I kicked the guy in the balls and made him run out of the place. But none of that was true, none of it. So what was it doing in my notes? How had it made its way into my journal?

One night I strolled down to the pier, hoping the few clouds of the previous nights had lifted and I might get a glimpse of the lights in Havana. I thought the view would free my head. I’d bought a pair of binoculars but I knew I didn’t really need them if the skies were clear. This night was spectacular: a swash of stars seemed to create a bridge between the Keys and Cuba, and the sky was a deep blue velvet. I closed my eyes, breathed deep and held the salty air in my lungs. I’d bought an ice cream cone and it was melting right through my fingers.

“Waiting for somebody?” the other woman at the guesthouse asked, out of nowhere, while I was staring off the pier at what I was sure was the halo over Havana.

“Huh?”

“You know, a balsa or something?” She was trying to be funny but I wasn’t amused. I remembered all those times my cousin Titi had tried to leave and had never made it very far off the shore. I tried to project myself into her place, to consider the impact of those ninety miles and the possibility of washing up here, in this crazy queer town that has so little do with the rest of the world. I turned around and tried to find Miami in the opposite direction, but the sky was mysteriously black and starless to the north, with a toxic haze over what might be the city.

“There used to be a railroad that connected the Keys to Miami but it got destroyed by a hurricane,” the woman said, apparently reading my mind. She wasn’t going away, regardless of the fact that I was ignoring her. “Now there’s a highway,” she said, turning her attention away from me and to the jugglers and hustlers who flock to the pier.

“Yes,” I said, realizing just how small she was, how like a child who I could just hold in my arms. I assumed she was trying to pick me up, and I considered it for a minute.

“No hay mal que por bien no venga,” she said, turning in my direction again. Her accent in Spanish was Colombian or Venezuelan. While I thought about it, she repeated what she said in English, in case I didn’t understand: “There’s no bad that’s not good in the long run.” She dropped some coins into a hat a mime had put out on the ground for just that purpose. The guy, dressed in green—including green face make-up—looked like a giant sprout and was pretending he was trapped in a box.

“Why do you say that?” I asked, licking the ice cream dripping around and between my fingers.

“You don’t really look like you came here to have fun,” she said, “but more to get away.”

I laughed. “What are you, telepathic?”

Now it was her turn to laugh. “Well, no, not exactly,” she said. “But I’ll do a Tarot reading for you for ten bucks if you’d like.”

When she said that, I laughed aloud. So she wasn’t after my body after all, but my money and soul. I thought about my mother and the babalao who told her she’d marry my father and have beautiful white-skinned children, and how now Nena was in love with Bernie, whom she no doubt would marry, and with whom she’d have children, darker than Rosa, with curly mulato hair and lips like rose petals; and I thought about my Tío Raúl and his encounter with Caviancito, how he’d ignored his advice and met his destiny anyway.

“What good would a reading do me?” I asked, but I was smiling.

She shrugged. “It’s different for each person,” she said. “You know, for some people, it confirms their plans, their ambitions. For others, it helps them stay away from dangers. I suppose, if you don’t believe, it’s worthless.”

I tossed the remainder of my cone into a trash can and wiped my hands on my shorts. I hadn’t realized we’d been walking together.

“You know,” I said, “I actually do believe in those sorts of things—Tarot, shells, tea leaves, the works. But I think I’d rather not know my future. I think I’d rather be surprised. But thanks anyway.”

Then I stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the street to a little stationery and book shop, where I bought a copy of Penthouse Letters. I needed to get my journal right, and to write that letter to Titi, but first, I needed to wipe myself out, I needed to put my head down and stop thinking.

“Hey Bernie,” I said in his direction when I got back to Miami. I’d just walked in the door and he was sitting at his computers, his head bent intently into the screen. Nena was at work.

“Hey Juani,” he said, smiling but barely looking up, his fingers working furiously on the board. I guessed he was tracking couriers for his business or doing some other mysterious technological work.

I didn’t want to bother him, so I quietly set my bag down on the floor, and plopped down on the couch. I liked Nena and Bernie’s loft but I didn’t think one big open room was for me. It didn’t matter how large it was or who I lived with—even Nena—I’d want to close a door sometimes.

I watched Bernie, his shoulders curving toward the screen, all his muscles tight. The phones were curiously quiet. There was no music on. Bernie’s arm arched on the desk, moving his mouse in a circle. He was so at home. It struck me, in fact, that this was much more his home than Nena’s—his business was here, his rehearsal space. I knew that big bed in the corner hadn’t come with her. The art was too African, too Third World, to be Nena’s—the elongated bodies of the wooden sculptures by the door, the multi-colored handwoven kentes on the walls. There were a handful of surfboards, phallic and thick, leaning against one wall. For an instant, they looked like an installation.

I was tired but I knew I couldn’t sleep with Bernie working in the same room, no matter how far away from me he was. It would just feel like he was watching, even if he never even glanced my way. I figured I’d try to work. I took out the notebook on which I’d scribbled a few notes to Titi. Nothing was coming to me. What, after all, do you say to someone you’ve never met? Someone who, you’ve been told all your life, is nuts? Someone whom you suspect is a lesbian, like you? I didn’t want to make assumptions but I also wanted to make a connection.

I’d come to the realization that, if I went to Cuba, I wanted to stay with Titi, or at a hotel. My cousin Tomás Joaquín, whom I love, is just too much of a gossip. Whatever I did on the island would be reported back to my family in more detail than I’d ever care for. (I suspect Patricia knows that, which is why she didn’t recommend writing to him, much less staying with him.) I was starting some new scratches when Bernie let out a yelp on his computer, shot up from his seat and hit the refrigerator for a carton of orange juice, which he guzzled straight.

“Want some?” he offered me.

“Nah, thanks,” I said.

He nodded and wandered back to his computer. “Okay, level twenty,” he said, settling back in.

“Hey, you’re not working!” I exclaimed, slapping down my notebook. “And here I’m trying to be quiet and everything.”

He laughed. “Well, so was II” he grinned. “You play Mario?”

“Hey, man, I play anything if you teach me,” I said, leaping over to his side of the loft and settling into his partner George’s chair.

Bernie turned on a second computer. He had loaded it with a slew of games I’d never even heard of. When I told him I liked Lethal Enforcer and Mortal Kombat, he found a killer kick-boxing game with stunning graphics and some nasty sounds. Bernie stacked six CDs into the deck and we took off on our respective screen rampages with a soundtrack that spanned the globe: Guillermo Portabales, Angelique Kidjo, Khaled, Sheila Chandra, some weird klezmer compilation, and The Beades.

For at least a few hours, I was in heaven.