THE FIRST TIME I visited Paris—what a lovely, unreal phrase! — I was just twenty-three, I had never in my life been on a plane, and the only idea I had of the City of Light was just that: a sort of vague glow imported from my readings of Balzac, Flaubert, Rabelais, Proust; by the paintings of the impressionists and Fantin-Latour, Gustave Courbet, Marie Laurencin …; by the songs of Claude François (although Lully’s opera Atys had come first, as had Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier), Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Juliette Gréco, Barbara, and Serge Gainsbourg; by the movies shown in Havana movie theaters and sometimes, from Easter to the Día de San Juan, on Cuban television — Les demoiselles de Rochefort, Le gentleman de Cocody, Fantômas, Rocco et ses frères, Fanfan la tulipe, Le samouraï, Les tribulations d’un chinois en Chine, and my favorite, La belle et la bête.
I wanted my voice, my hair, to be like Françoise Dorléac’s; I yearned to seem as melancholy as Catherine Deneuve, to feel loved by Jean Marais, and to be kidnapped by Alain Delon, though rescued by Jean-Paul Belmondo. I longed to write and direct movies like Jean Cocteau, and I dreamed that my grandfather was a very funny old gentleman named Fufu—Louis de Funès. In real life, it was my grandmother who bore an eerie resemblance to that brilliant man, who in my opinion was one of the greatest actors ever seen by humankind.
From all these works and people I had acquired my first notions of Paris, and of France. Ah, but I mustn’t forget my then husband’s uncle, one of those exile gusanos—worms—excoriated by Castro but transformed by the magic of Jimmy Carter into a butterfly, who on his first trip from Puerto Rico to Cuba, his second home—he’d been born in Spain but raised in Cuba—stepped off the plane with suitcases filled with Chanel No. 5. The family was expecting chorizos or, if not chorizos, something equally suitable for satisfying its Communist hunger, but he showed up with Chanel No. 5, and I, at least, appreciated it enormously. Since we had nothing to eat, or nothing but shit, I’d lost interest in food. It was the first time anybody had ever given me French perfume; the fact is, it was the first time I’d seen a bottle of French perfume, or smelled it. Till then the only thing I’d worn was Red Moscow, which stank, and Paris, a Bulgarian cologne named for the hero of the Iliad.
That first trip of mine to Paris was not a pleasure trip, exactly. I should make it clear that in 1983, very few Cubans could travel outside Cuba, and those who did travel invariably did so for the same reasons: they were either representatives of the regime who were authorized to travel, or “traitors” to the regime who were departing, lugubriously and forever, into exile. Only a handful of marriages to foreigners were beginning to occur at this time, and the jinetes and pingueros—whores and hustlers—had not yet come on the scene, at least not like now, in such extraordinary numbers and under such abusive conditions for themselves. I was a member of the first category above, those “authorized to travel,” although I was not a government functionary—I was actually a student at the university. But I was married to a functionary, the editor of a film magazine that I myself, several years later, would edit. It seems my husband had fallen out of grace for having defended a movie that Fidel Castro hated. In Cuba, when one of the Castro brothers hated somebody, the person in question knew there were two possible fates for him from that point on: a velvet-box exile in an embassy somewhere abroad (the famous traversée du désert, as the French so elegantly call it), or the firing-squad wall. There was a third option, though it was the least attractive of them all: being “sent to the tank” — prison.
My functionary-husband was sent off to an embassy, as first secretary. His boss at the magazine was made ambassador, and all the others on the boss’s staff were sent abroad, too. The men weren’t allowed to travel unaccompanied, since the government argued that the CIA might send a spy in the guise of a lover, to entrap them and force them to desert. That was when they decided we had to get married, so I could accompany my functionary-husband on the new assignment he’d been given by the Revolution, as far as possible from the world of Cuban culture. Anyone in their right mind would say that a trip to Paris was a reward. But in the mind of the Communists, the reward was Moscow—Paris was a punishment.
And that was how I came to board a plane run by the most religious airline in the world—Cubana, which flew when it was the will of God to fly. That was the saying, anyway. So I abandoned a room in Old Havana—no water, no electricity, no stove, with a collective bathroom down the hall—to move to a city that I had been dreaming about practically since I was born. My grandmother never stopped telling us that babies came from Paris, wrapped in a diaper and brought by a stork. That meant that I—in my fantastical mind—was making a journey back home.
In Havana I was always very Parisian; in Paris, I’ve always been very habanera. But I only realized that years later. I left in December of 1983, alone with a man I’d married overnight who’d been turned overnight into a diplomat. I left without my mother, virtually alone. (Traveling with a man is traveling alone.) I knew nothing about the world; all I knew was what Fidel’s daily news programs told me: The world was a bad place, the worst of humanity. Cuba was a gem, a paradise. Outside, the entire world wanted to be like Cuba. Traveling in those days, at the age of twenty-three, was for me like a trip for a three-year-old today. My sixteen-year-old daughter knows more about the world than I could even imagine when I was her age. But then she doesn’t know Cuba. Although she was born there, it’s the only country she doesn’t know anything about.
The first problem in traveling to a cold country in the middle of December was clothes. I had two summer dresses, two pairs of jeans, two light turtlenecks—that was it. We were taken to a store, called La International, where the only people who could make purchases were the functionaries being sent to the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. The only things in the store for sale were bolts of gray or brown wool cloth. I picked out six yards of brown wool, and my mother-in-law made me a coat copied from an old French magazine. The lining was made from a burlap sack, dyed, and it was so stiff that when I wore the coat it looked like I was disguised as a transatlantic steamer—which seemed to my mother-in-law the right sort of look for crossing the ocean.
The first few weeks I wore that coat in Paris, there wasn’t a person on the street who didn’t stare at me, and anybody who knows Paris knows that in Paris, nobody looks at anybody—nothing is striking enough to draw a true Parisian’s second glance. Except, that is, for me in my boat disguise.
The first night I spent in Paris, I fainted twice. Dropped like a chicken with its neck wrung. The lights, the perfumes—so much light, so many lovely fragrances at once, just literally bowled me over. The second time I fainted was as I was walking past one of those little ovens they have in the street for roasting chicken. The smell of that chicken entered my nose, went up to my brain, passed through my arteries, and bang! — I hit the sidewalk. I’d never smelled so much roast chicken in my life. The last time we’d had chicken in my house in Havana was when my grandmother was sick. I was ten years old. Six months later we couldn’t go to pick up the rest of the chicken we were entitled to on our ration card because my grandmother had the bad luck—for us—to die two days before the next shipment to the store came in.
The day after my fainting spells, the ambassador from the Cuban Office to UNESCO insisted that I go to the hospital. Everything went smoothly there—I had a blue diplomatic passport, I was seen immediately—under the fixed gaze of a Spanish Communist driver sent precisely to keep that stern eye on us. It turned out the Spanish Embassy was on the verge of firing him, as they’d discovered he had a “vice,” as they termed it: he played the tiercé, the French version of the horseracing trifecta. But the Spanish Communist said his mea culpas or mea Cubas (thanks, Guillermo Cabrera Infante) and they reinstated him in the service of automobiles and surveillance of the embassy and the Cuban Office to UNESCO. At that point he became more of a Castroite than Castro.
I weighed forty-three kilos—less than ninety-eight pounds—and had full-blown anemia, and when I told the doctor about the circumstances under which I’d lost consciousness the second time, he smirked and said—obviously, said the driver later, that doctor was no Communist, and was probably actually an enemy of the Revolution—that instead of smelling the chicken, what I should have done was buy some and eat it. And that was what he prescribed for me: Eat chicken, meat in all its many varieties, and fruit. And he assured me that this was the first time he’d ever recommended this to a woman in France, but he ended by saying, “Fatten yourself up, madame, or the next time you fall you will break a bone!”
Which is exactly what happened. The third time I fell, I broke my coccyx. So I was confined to my bed for two months, with my ass in state, eating, reading, watching French television, where everybody talks and I could hardly understand a word. That was another thing—I spoke exactly zero French. That’s why when we left the hospital and I listened to that driver spewing fire and brimstone against the doctor, I couldn’t understand quite why he was doing it. Until, that is, he translated what the doctor had said when he said, “Les gens qu’arrivent des pays communistes atterrissent d’abord chez le médecin, et ensuite, vous allez voir: attendez-vous à une crise de foie”: “People arrive from these Communist countries and the first place they wind up is at the doctor’s, and then, you wait and see, prepare yourself for a liver crisis.” And as a matter of fact, after two months being laid up in bed eating everything, or almost everything, I did have a liver crisis. When the doctor advised me to eat meat, I’d forgotten to explain to him that with what the Cuban government paid me each month for being a Cultural Documentary-Film Maker I could buy only four chickens (one per week) and not much else. But that was fine with me—since in Cuba I couldn’t eat a chicken even once a year and hadn’t actually tasted chicken since I was ten years old, I spent my Paris money on cheap chocolates from Ed l’Épicier. Not for nothing was my liver ready to pop. When I got to the hospital, the doctor on duty asked if I was an alcoholic. “No,” I said. “Chocoholic.”
Once those first hospital traumas were behind me and my tremendous sense of melancholy, homesickness, missing my mother, had become less intense, I started sneaking out. We weren’t allowed to go out alone; we had to be accompanied by two of the embassy’s policemen-with-diplomatic-passports—nice guys at first glance but, especially the Asturian driver, grouchy as hell. But I started taking on jobs that nobody wanted to do: taking the mail to la poste, being a messenger between the embassy and the offices of various UNESCO countries. Between one visit and another, I’d go out to the street, breathe some fresh air, smoke a cigarette, and walk two or three times around the Métro entrance. I’d never entered the Métro; I was terrified of entering the Métro. The Communists said women were raped and murdered there. The other thing I was terrified of was shopping. To Communists, shopping was an illness, a disease. And I wanted to go home to my mother in the same condition she’d seen me leave in: healthy, perfectly healthy, although with an almost chronic anemia and less meat on my bones than it would take to make a meatball.
Finally I was given the assignment of carrying some secret correspondence between the UNESCO office and the Cuban Embassy. That day the Asturian driver was working with the ambassador and the diplomatic police in an important meeting to prepare for the visit of a high-ranking French government official. There was no help for it: I’d have to take the Métro. The Spanish secretary—another Communist—walked with me to the entrance of the Métro, showed me how to buy a ticket, how to slip it into the slot, and how to quickly slip inside. I got stuck three times. I looked around—I was more embarrassed than I’d ever been in my life. People couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get through the turnstile. I banged into that turnstile so many times that the ticket seller finally came out of his booth and opened the handicapped entrance for me, thinking I had some sort of brain malformation that prevented me from entering the Métro like a normal person. Once I’d delivered those important documents that made me incredibly nervous because everywhere I looked I could see the Enemy that was going to snatch them out of my hands in broad daylight—of course I didn’t open the envelope (it’s best to remain ignorant of a dictatorship’s secrets), although I admit I was tempted—I left the embassy and walked back. It was then that I felt—that I breathed—free. I was alone, apparently nobody was watching me, and if I felt like it, I could take off running to the American Embassy and ask for political asylum. I didn’t; I wanted to see my mother again and I was too in love with my husband. And when you’re too in love, the other person oftentimes isn’t, but that’s another story.
From a room in Old Havana we moved to an attic on the rue Saint-Dominique—after living with the ambassador in the ambassador’s residence for a year, that is, putting up with his rudeness, his snide remarks, his foul moods. I spent a year being his maid, without being paid a cent, in addition to my work at UNESCO. After we moved, he decided that I would continue to be his maid, and I agreed because having won his trust through my silence—at the time, I didn’t talk—the job allowed me a degree of freedom. I was able to move between his residence, the office, and the embassy without being so controlled; I was given permission and a Carte Orange to use in the Métro, and I could meet with certain trusted Latin Americans without having to turn in reports on them to the embassy’s counterintelligence people. Playing stupid is always the right thing to do with Communists.
What did they consider stupid? I spent my days reading newspapers in French and trying to learn the language by watching television and listening to the people talking, not trying to insist on speaking Spanish—excuse me, Cuban—or pretending that the French were under the obligation to understand me just because I was a Cuban “revolutionary.” And I’d pick up all the invitations to art exhibits and museums that came into the office—activities that the Castro officials avoided like the plague. I was stupid because instead of visiting the city’s stores and shops like all the other wives accompanying their diplomat-husbands—and never buying anything, because what would they use for money? — I would go to museums, try to learn French, and socialize with the Latin Americans friendly to the embassy, or at least the ones the embassy thought were still its friends.
Five years went by like that. I loved walking through the Champ-de-Mars, the Champs-Élysées, loved going into bookstores to hide in a corner and read books forbidden by the embassy—that’s how I got to read the books of Armando Valladares and some of Reinaldo Arenas’s and my maestro’s, Guillermo Cabrera Infante. The people in the embassy pressed me, since I liked books so much, into throwing out all the books that Alejo Carpentier had written when he was cultural attaché in the Castro embassy—thousands of titles! I didn’t do it; instead, I organized a library that they later proudly showed to all their visitors.
I loved the libraries, the museums. For several months the Louvre was a very special refuge, as were the Musée Gustave Moreau and the Jeu de Paume. I would lean back on a bench in the place de Furstenberg for hours, smoking; I would walk the streets of the Latin Quarter passionately, like something out of a François Truffaut movie; I would drink kirs in the bistros and nourish myself on baguettes slathered with butter and Bonne Maman strawberry jam! I smoked and smoked and smoked, like my idol Serge Gainsbourg. And read and read and read, like my other idol Bernard Pivot. And so I gradually acquired more freedom, although more than once, looking over my shoulder, I discovered that some official from the embassy was following me. I became an expert in messing with their heads. I would carry wigs, hats, scarves in my purse; I’d gotten a new coat. And whenever I could, I’d slip into a stairwell to put on a disguise to throw them off, or sneak down a corridor to the building’s back exit.
As I gained more freedom, other things began to draw my attention. First, money. I discovered that in order to have all the things I liked—books, records, that sort of thing—I first had to learn to respect and like money. Before, it hadn’t mattered to me, or I had actively disliked it. Now I wanted to save money so I could take presents back to my mother in Cuba, and the only way to get the things I liked was to do what in Cuba had become the only way to live—become a criminal. Another diplomat’s wife invited me to sell the cases of rum that the government sent to be given out as gifts for New Year’s. We set ourselves up in the busiest corner of the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro station and started selling rum for twenty francs, then moved on to Cuban cigars and gasoline chits. The rum was a hit among the Muslim population.
One afternoon I went to rent Le grand Meaulnes in its old version—the movie based on the Alain-Fournier novel—and the clerk asked me if I’d let him take nude photos of me for his customers. I said OK. Later I modeled for painters, among them one very famous one, Monsieur B. My baby face and teenager’s body were perfect for his paintings. What I’m saying is that I led a double life, and on a diplomatic passport.
I figure the dossier they have on me in the offices of the Sureté is as thick as a brick. The ambassador, playing dumb, would praise my job performance—and in every conversation with his illustrious visitors he would say that I’d learned more than anybody in the embassy about this city. At one of those moments I was wearing a tulle skirt I had found in the marché aux puces at Porte de Clignancourt and a velvet jacket I’d bought for almost nothing at a Guerrisol—an Arab shop that sells dead people’s clothes—and Alberto Moravia, his hand beneath my tulle, was stroking my behind.
“What a lovely outfit!” crooned the publisher Ingrid Feltrinelli, eyeing my costume. “Who is it?”
I didn’t know a thing about labels or designers; all I knew was that my fingers were throbbing from all the needle pricks I’d given myself that afternoon as I’d sewn up the skirt. So I lied.
“Dior, it’s Dior.” (Dior, forgive me—I can’t ask forgiveness of Dios, another designer that’s done pretty well for himself.)
I loved Paris with all my heart. But I had to get a divorce and flee the city I loved best for that other one, which I also loved very, very much, though with increasing reticence. I returned to Havana. I couldn’t imagine that I’d be going back to Paris six years later, married to a Cuban filmmaker, with our year-and-a-half-old daughter (what I had to do to take her with us!), on a three-month visa. I knew that that departure would be the last … I sensed it. My passport was no longer that magical shade of Prussian blue that symbolized the diplomatic corps. My passport was gray, like any other government official’s. I had been invited to Paris as a writer and the assistant publisher of the journal Cine Cubano, and I carried several novels and poems in my suitcase filled with books. My mother stayed behind, alone. I’d charged her with taking care of my library.
I breathed the winter air of Paris and felt that I’d been reborn. We stayed with a painter in the Marais. My husband, my daughter, and I slept on an IKEA sofa until somebody gave us a crib for the baby. We lived for three months with no money, boiling spaghetti—no sauce—and drinking milk, both of which the painter bought us. Fortunately, friends I had met during my previous sojourn in Paris often invited us out for dinner. On April 5, 1995, when my second novel, La nada cotidiana, was published by Actes-Sud, those friends, or almost all of them, cut off my lights and water—they stopped speaking to me. The embassy sent an emissary to warn me that I would not be allowed to return to Cuba. At that, the French authorities informed me that they would never give me political asylum or legal residency, that I either had to go back to Cuba or go to the United States. I spent many long days in the police station on the rue de Lutèce. After hours of interrogation by a lieutenant and the chief of police himself, I would return to the Paris streets, step into Notre-Dame, light a few candles stolen from the dead, and go back home, feeling a little better. For ten years we paid taxes and waited for French citizenship. My books sold very well and my face was on ads in the Métro. I was a member of the Cannes jury, and I was still “undocumented.” Once I became a Spanish citizen, the French made me a French one. But none of that kept me from loving this city. When I felt lonely and miserable, I’d go down to the Seine with a white plate of meringue and leave it for Oshún, the mother-goddess of rivers, the goddess of love, an offering so that she would help me. Now that I think of it, that may have been one reason they wouldn’t give me the papers, because if some gendarme saw me leaving a plateful of meringue on the bank of the Seine, he must surely have said that I was absolutely out of my head, batty, alienée, ready for the insane asylum!
The fact is, I was mad—mad for Paris. In the bookshops of the rue Beautreillis I learned what freedom was, talking to the people there. Yes, I know, Parisians are difficult, but you have to prod them. Here, I realized that the words the French use most are “découragé,” “solitude,” “ridé” … The phrase inevitably used by men to reply is “Oui, mais non …” My greatest problem was water and the use they made of it. They’ve not only replaced water with wine, but they shower very infrequently. The BO in the Métro killed me—it still kills me—not to mention the smell of rotten cheese between the teeth, the wine on the breath, and the clouds of dandruff, which looks like snow in the middle of summer. I didn’t have too many problems in the winter. Although I’m not cold natured, I adapted by wearing caps, gloves, scarves, and all the paraphernalia that goes with overcoats. It wasn’t easy—when I didn’t lose my gloves, it was my beret, and I still have the sense sometimes that the umbrella is my third arm, because when it starts drizzling, it drizzles! And with that irritating drip, drip, drip that would make you think that half a dozen drummers were playing a rumba beat on your head with their fingertips.
I must say that I’ve gotten along well with the Parisian men. With the Parisian women it’s another story. Those women are tough. If I were a man, I wouldn’t have all that patience. If men’s stinginess is proverbial, women’s is biblical. I remember the time that painter we were staying with introduced us to his girlfriend. We invited her to dinner; I made arroz con frijoles negros and picadillo, with platanitos fritos—practically the Cuban national meal. She looked at the plate as though instead of a Cuban dinner she was standing before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The painter had warned us that the surprise of the night would be left to his girlfriend. We thought he was talking about the wine, but no—she proceeded to drink all our wine, and then our rum, and then absolutely all our liqueurs. The surprise of the night was (Beethoven, please—da-da-da-dum) … cheese.
She took from her bag a small silver package, a little wrinkled and not a little mashed, opened it before our astonished eyes, cut us each a tiny piece of camembert as though slicing up a gold nugget, rewrapped her cheese, and tucked it back in her purse. The only reason my husband and I didn’t burst out laughing was out of respect for our friend the painter.
What do I love most about this city? Its passion for art, its resistance to anything that’s happening to us in the present, when the discourse is increasingly political and/or religious. Paris resists, with its art exhibits, its editions, its bookstores, its museums, its designers, its artists, its writers. Paris resists in art, no doubt about it. Though Paris no longer functions because of its artists. Paris is not just the center; it’s also the suburbs and their infinite anguish, racial problems, stories of abandonment, of unemployment, of inability to “fit in.” But I’m not going to tell any politically correct stories. What I’m interested in is the cultural life of this city—its theaters, its movie houses. That’s why I stayed here; that’s why I decided to create and make a life for myself in Paris. That’s why I had to give birth to Paris—a difficult childbirth, no question, but in the end, the child has brought exceptional love into my life.
Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley