chapter twenty-two
Marisol
I sit in the passenger seat, staring at the palm trees waving in the breeze. I don’t speak. Magda has taken everything I thought I knew about my family, about my grandmother, about myself, and turned it upside down. The man I knew as my grandfather, who my father believes is his father, isn’t really at all. Instead, my biological grandfather is—was—one of Fidel’s men, a man who died fighting in the Cuban Revolution, who gave his life for everything my family stands against. The sheer fact that my grandmother loved a revolutionary was difficult to wrap my mind around, but this—
“Do you think your grandfather knew?” Luis asks. “About the baby?”
I try to remember the times I saw them together, how he treated me and my father, my sisters, the love he showed all of us.
My grandfather was one of the first people my grandmother met when she arrived in the United States; his family was involved in the early days of the Cuban exile movement, assisting new arrivals to acclimate to life in the United States after Castro took power. His parents—my great-grandparents—left during the Cuban Revolution of 1933, which ousted then President Machado, a general who’d fought against Spain in the War for Cuban Independence.
My grandfather was born in the United States, and his stories weren’t of Cuba, but rather watching Florida grow and change throughout the years. When Great-Grandfather Perez died he left his sugar empire—resuscitated from its near demise at the hands of Fidel Castro and his compatriots—to my grandfather to run. And so Perez Sugar was for the first time since its inception in the late 1800s run by a Ferrera and not a Perez.
According to my grandmother, theirs was a whirlwind courtship. He fell in love with her the first moment he saw her sitting in the living room of a family friend’s house in Miami. It took him a month to wear her down, and once he did they eloped in a simple ceremony in City Hall. I asked her once if she regretted missing out on the big, splashy wedding.
Those were difficult times, Marisol. We weren’t thinking of gowns or parties anymore. We were mourning—the loss of our country, our family, our friends.
And now I understand my grandmother’s urgency a bit more. She was pregnant and unmarried in a time when she would have caused a huge scandal and likely added to her family’s grief.
“He had to have known,” I answer. “She wouldn’t have kept it from him. Not something like that. Besides, my father was born months after they came to the United States. My grandfather would have suspected based on when the baby was conceived.”
Magda told me how much my grandmother grieved when she discovered her lover died in Santa Clara. I can only imagine what it must have been like for my grandmother—nineteen, pregnant, caught in the midst of a revolution, learning the man she loved, the father of her child, was dead. Who could my grandmother have trusted with her secrets after something like that? She’d been forced to leave her best friend and the woman who’d practically raised her in Cuba. My great-grandparents no doubt would have been angry and ashamed, especially given the identity of the baby’s father. No wonder she’d ended up with my grandfather. Did he ask her to keep the secret of my father’s paternity or did she choose to do so on her own?
“I wish—”
My voice breaks off, and I can’t finish the thought, the emotions pummeling me.
I wish I’d known the truth. I wish I’d had a chance to know my biological grandfather, to hear how my grandmother felt about him in her own words.
I loved my grandfather, and while I don’t remember him well, my memories are of a good man, my memories of my grandparents’ marriage a loving one. But this need to know, to understand where I came from, is a powerful urge.
Luis starts the car’s engine and pulls out onto the road. I glance back at Magda’s building; we exchanged information and plan on keeping in touch.
“Your grandmother must have been very brave to survive so many losses,” Luis says, his voice gentle.
And at such a young age, too.
“She was.”
“You should be proud of that. And of him. For better or worse, strong blood runs through your veins. You read his letters to her. What sort of man was he?”
Can you take the measure of a person based on ten or twenty letters? I don’t know. As a writer, I know better than anyone how easily words and emotions can be manipulated. But I do know my grandmother, and I cannot believe she would love a man who wasn’t worthy of it.
“He was a good man.” I recall the words he wrote her, the passionate strokes of his pen across the page. “A dreamer. A fighter.”
“Then he is an ancestor you can proudly claim.”
Is it that easy? Was his legacy saved by death? Had he lived through the events of the revolution and everything that came after, would he have spoken out against Fidel’s abuses or would he have turned into a monster himself?
The line between hero and villain is a precariously fragile one.
“I’m sorry he died,” Luis says. “That you weren’t able to find him like you wanted.”
“Me, too.”
This is it. There are no more answers to be found, only questions. I will never have a chance to know the man whose blood runs through my veins. This part of my family is gone now, too, just like my grandmother.
When I was searching for her lover, there was still hope, a sense of purpose to my trip here beyond finding her final resting place. Now there’s just the unknown, and of course, the uncertainty of my relationship with Luis.
He brings our joined fingers to his lips, kissing my knuckles. “Everything is going to be okay,” he says, as though he can read the thoughts going through my mind.
“Will it?”
“Ojalá.”
I smile, the spirit behind the word something so quintessentially Cuban, something incrementally beyond hope that exists entirely out of our hands.
“This means something to me, Marisol,” Luis says, echoing his earlier words in the hotel elevator.
A little crack forms over my heart. “This means something to me, too.”
I spend the rest of the drive back to Havana with Luis’s arm wrapped around my shoulders, his lips occasionally brushing my temple, our legs pressed against each other, studying his profile.
“Let’s go out tonight,” he suggests as we near the city. “Let’s do something to take your mind off all of this.”
“Like a date?”
He laughs. “Yes, a proper date. Somewhere along the way we’ve gotten things turned around a bit. I’ll pick you up and take you to dinner—nothing fancy, but I promise the food will be perfection.” He winks at me. “I happen to know a few good paladares. Afterward, we can go dancing.”
I grin. “You dance?”
Somehow I can’t quite imagine formal, slightly serious Luis dancing. Then again—
“Occasionally,” he says with a small smile. “Don’t tell anyone, but my grandmother taught me when I was a very little boy.”
“Mine, too. She used to play old records in her living room, and we’d dance together. I was terrible at first,” I confess.
“And now?” he teases.
“I have a few moves.”
“I’m even more intrigued. I need to help my grandmother get ready for the dinner service since I missed yesterday, but perhaps we can go out afterward?”
“I would love that.”
When we arrive back at the house, we part ways, and I set my bag down in my bedroom and head to the heart of the house—the kitchen—where Ana is preparing dinner for the paladar’s guests.
She smiles when she sees me.
“How was your trip?” she asks, greeting me with a kiss on the cheek.
“Beautiful,” I answer. I’m not ready to tell her what we learned from Magda, am still processing the news myself. “Can I help you prepare dinner?”
Ana waves me off with a cluck of her tongue. “No, no. I have it. It’s almost done. We have paella today.”
I can smell it, the aroma of yellow rice and seafood filling the tiny space. She has the same style of enormous pan my grandmother used to cook her paella sitting on top of the stove.
“How do you decide the menu each day?” I ask.
“It depends on what I can get at the market. If I can find chicken that day, we eat arroz con pollo. If they have seafood, I make a paella. We’re limited by the shortages, of course, but we make do.”
“That has to be challenging.”
She smiles. “I like a bit of a challenge. It helps me to be creative with the menu, and it keeps the guests happy because there’s always variety. It’s not an easy business; when the government opened the paladar system, many tried and many failed. The taxes and license fees can bankrupt you. Not to mention, you can create a menu only to have it fail miserably when you can’t find the ingredients. You can spend days searching for something as simple as eggs or milk.
“Many of our guests, the tourists who come, don’t understand the challenges we face. They judge our restaurants by the standards they are used to in their home countries, but we make do with Cuban ingenuity.”
She winks at me.
“It doesn’t hurt that we have Luis playing ‘La Bayamesa’ on the saxophone. We hang the photos my husband took in the revolution’s early days on the wall, serve our guests on what’s left of my grandmother’s finest china. They come here for the romantic Cuban experience, and we give it to them.”
Was that what I came here for? The “romantic Cuban experience”? I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’d had an image in my mind of what it would be like here. I’d told myself I’d be open-minded, that I wouldn’t let the stories I’d heard, my family’s perspective of exile, cloud my impressions of the real Cuba. I’d been convinced I’d find two narratives here—ours and theirs, and that the truth would lie somewhere in between. But I didn’t realize how bad it would be. In all the discussions of opening relations with Cuba, of eradicating the embargo, the focus has always been on the island as a tourist paradise, perpetually frozen in time. I didn’t realize how much people still suffered, didn’t understand the depth and breadth of the problems facing everyday Cubans.
Ana gives me a sidelong glance.
“Speaking of Luis—” Her voice trails off for a moment. “Elisa and I used to talk about our lives when we grew older. We imagined being bridesmaids in each other’s weddings, raising our children together, becoming grandmothers together. We used to imagine our children playing as best friends, perhaps even falling in love. It’s good to see the two of you together.”
“We’re not—”
I’m not even sure how to finish the sentence. Not together? Not in love?
“I don’t know how we can be together,” I say instead.
“Have faith, Marisol. You could be good for each other. It might seem impossible now, but trust me, you never know what the future can bring.”
Luis walks into the kitchen at the tail end of her speech, greeting his grandmother with a hug and kiss. I busy myself with the paella, mindlessly stirring to occupy my hands, my cheeks burning. There are some things we’ve yet to speak of, conversations I’m not ready to have. I leave soon—what will happen when I do? Will we keep in touch or will this connection between us peter out once we return to our normal lives?
Ana leaves to visit the guests, and we’re alone once again.
Luis closes the distance between us, kissing my forehead. He smiles at me as I pause mid-stir.
His fingers stroke my nape. I flush again.
“You’re nervous,” he says, sounding amused by the notion.
“Yes.”
“Why? You weren’t nervous before.”
“I was always a bit nervous, but it feels strange in this house, with your grandmother here, Cristina, your mother. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. And then there’s everything else. I don’t want to start something I can’t finish; I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I confess. “I came to bury my grandmother, and now everything is mixed up. I have a grandfather I never knew I had. And you—”
I came here to write an article about tourist locales, and now my mind is full of policy and injustice; I came here single and carefree, and now I risk leaving my heart behind. It’s as though Cuba has awoken something in me, and I can’t—don’t want to—shut it off.
“I know.” Luis steps back with a sigh. “Things are complicated.”
“Yes.”
I turn, looking into his dark eyes, searching—
“You’re good at that,” I murmur.
“Good at what?”
“Hiding what you’re feeling, thinking. About some things, you’re an open book, but with others . . .” My voice trails off. “You’re difficult to read.”
“Is it really a mystery, Marisol?”
I close my eyes at the sound of my name falling from his lips, as my pulse accelerates, at the flutter in my stomach.
When I open my eyes, he’s still there, his gaze boring into me, his expression as inscrutable as ever.
Luis steps forward, closing the distance between us, his lips caressing my forehead, his fingers running through my hair.
He takes a step back and gestures toward the stove. “Dinner is almost finished. Can you be ready in an hour?”
I open my mouth to answer him—
Luis’s mom, Caridad, walks into the kitchen, setting a stack of plates down on the tiny counter space with a thud.
Luis’s hand drops to his side. My cheeks flame as I take a deep breath, the air whooshing through my lungs.
“Do you want to leave in an hour or so?” he asks again, his voice low.
I nod.
Caridad’s gaze follows me from the room.