Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

remember that water comes every other day here in the campo, that my grandmother doesn’t have a tank to store extra gallons, as Maydelis does in her home in La Habana.

When I leave the bathroom, Maydelis stands in the hallway, looking at me. Her hair is plastered to her wet forehead. She wears tiny shorts and flip-flops. One hand is on her hip in that very Cuban back-of-the-hand pose that betrays her real emotion. “I guess Abuela didn’t look too carefully at the bookshelf,” she says, not taking her eyes off me.

“What do you mean?” I can hear the catch in my own voice.

“The book is there.”

“Oh,” I turn my back to her, already heading to my room. “That’s good news then. We don’t have to look for Yosmany.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Good news for Yosmany.”

I almost add, And Abuela—but I can’t bring myself to say it.

I can hear her, Abuela Dolores, humming to herself in the kitchen. She is making my favorite, fricasé de pollo. Maydelis and I will return to La Habana tomorrow. Then a few more days and I fly back to Miami. And for no real reason, what I think about in that moment is that photo that came out in some of the Miami newspapers a little while back, Fidel Castro’s son Fidelito, beaming, a beard like his father’s, arms around Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell at some grand celebration or other in La Habana.

How far away that glamour feels from the campo, not so much in an economic sense but because news is slower, time trickles. There are luxury stores that sell Versace to tourists in La Habana now, but here oxen still till the land and my grandmother just wants a place to buy cumin that isn’t a flight away. She says cumin has disappeared.

“It was me,” I say to Maydelis, and all we can hear is my grandmother’s humming.

“I know,” she whispers, and I wait for her to ask me why but she doesn’t. I wait for her to ask why so I can confess that I think there is nothing I will ever be good at and no way that I will ever make up for the person I’ve been.

“You know,” Maydelis says, fanning herself, “I thought after this—after we’d met each other for the first time like this and spent all this time together like this—I thought you might send for me. I might try for a visa. I thought you would help me like that, but I realize now you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do that for me.”

“Of course I would!” I say, but she is right and I am stunned. I want to say that it’s not so easy, that I am a screwed-up recovering addict who lives in a moldy apartment and that I can barely support myself, much less someone else, and I almost, almost want to say, It’s not that bad here, but then I know she’s liable to ask me why I don’t stay then—and I don’t have an answer.

She walks away. Pulls a cigarette pack from her back pocket and leaves through the door.

I start to follow, but my grandmother sidles up beside me with a spoonful of the chicken stew, blowing over it. “Prueba,” she says, and sticks the spoon in my mouth.

I can taste the tomato, garlic, onion, the cumin she’s just run out of. The fricasé burns my tongue, but I say, delicious.

She takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen. We pass the bookshelf. “I shouldn’t have assumed Yosmany took it,” my grandmother says, turning to me, and I know that Cuba belongs to me even less than I ever believed.

I say nothing, but I pick up the book again and it feels heavier than before. I turn to the page with the faint ink and hold it up to the light as she watches me.

We are force, the ink reads in perfect script. Such an inscrutable thing to write in a book.

I look at my grandmother and think, I am forced to love you. But then, You are forced to love me too.

In the kitchen, we sit and wait for the hours to pass. Maydelis joins when she’s finished smoking. The goats are bleating outside, and I can hear two people shouting in the distance. I can’t tell if they are fighting, or joking and laughing. The kitchen smells like cumin and something else, something I can’t identify, something ancient.

10THAT BOMBS WOULD RAIN

Dolores

Camagüey, 1959

The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, his two-year-old daughter learned to say coffee. She sat in the wooden high chair that he built himself, and Dolores had just placed the cafetera on the stove and turned up the gas. Little Elena wiggled her hands in the air. She said, “Mamá, café!” except she couldn’t pronounce her f’s yet, so it sounded more like cah-weh.

Dolores laughed. Daniel laughed. He readied for work cutting caña as Dolores served three little cups of espresso: for her, Daniel, and their older daughter, seven-year-old Carmen. Dolores dipped her pinky into her cup and placed it in Elena’s mouth. The toddler latched on to the tip of her mother’s finger—Dolores had weaned her last year, but the little mouth didn’t forget how to suckle with abandon. Elena, true Cuban, loved coffee at two years old.

Daniel’s political convictions had emerged only a couple of years before. At first, Dolores feared the outcome. But as Daniel grew angrier in those years, she longed for those moments he’d sit on a stool in one corner of their two-room house, too busy fiddling with the radio dials to pay much attention to her. Radio Rebelde, the underground channel, consumed him. It originally broadcast out of Oriente, hours from Camagüey, but the rebels had set up satellite stations. Daniel kept the volume low, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, but Dolores caught snippets as she toiled around the house. Rebels and resistance, Cuba awakening, the people joining the movement.

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