Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

Nick’s wife, a mulataforty-one years his junior, makes a production of adjusting a lemony O-ring halter around her plentiful breasts, securing Nick’s line of sight and shooting me a look of warning. Her lifestyle, that of the wife of a coveted foreigner, is among the most luxurious in Cuba.

“My associate will be dressed as a tourist and take photos of you and the chuloat a disco, in flagrante,” Nick says.

I nod slowly, listening, and staring at his oiled nails. Nick’s reputation as the smartest investigator on the island led me to ask him for help finding my father, and he’s certain he can find—using only the clues in my mother’s diaries—the home where my mother lived in the 1970s as well as her lover’s last name and address. Nick is in possession of one of the most valued assets in Cuba: connections. Using his, I may cut my search by months. And Nick, upon hearing my story, agreed to take my case. But it wasn’t money he wanted in exchange. It was my services.

Nick continues: “Typical chulo’s woman is European or Canadian. She’s in her forties, fifties, sometimes sixties. She’s bossy and pale and can’t move her hips. But she’s convinced this young, usually mulato,Cuban male finds her incredibly attractive. She uses her money to control him, to keep his interest, and these macho Latinos don’t like it much. In every instance I’m aware of, they have Cuban girlfriends on the side and are keeping their options open with other foreign women. Our job is to catch the chulosscrewing around.”

“Fidelity testing?” I smirk. “Great line of work, Nick.”

Nick flashes the heel of his hand. “In this case, our client back in Norway has an investment to make. Wedding and expenses are going to set her back twenty-five, thirty grand. That’s prior to his migrating. She wants to see what kind of man he’s going to be now, beforeher hard-earned slips down the sewer. That’s where you come in.”

“If I fail?” I ask. “I’m pretty bossy and I can’t move my hips, either.” Truth is I could barely make eye contact with an attractive boy, much less trifle with a love-savvy cubano.

Nick’s wife touches my arm and interrupts my thoughts. “It’s a no-brainer. You’re young, attractive, andforeign. That makes you a triple threat. If the chulohas a cheating tendency, you’re the kind of prize he won’t pass up.”

The kind of prize noman could pass up slides through Nick’s back door, her lips curled into a perfect pout. She doesn’t look at anyone but Nick, and holds her hand palm-up, theatrically tossing her long black hair. Nick hastily pulls her inside.

“Modesta,” says Nick’s wife, whispering in my ear. “The meanest brujain Havana.” But I don’t manage to inquire further, because Nick bursts through the patio, his calm demeanor shaken. He and his wife exchange knowing glances.

Then, as if remembering me, Nick asks: “So? You taking this job?”

The ocean today is still like a lake, and fathers are playing with their children at the shore.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and families are laughing and carousing and swimming. I envy the great fortune of a whole generation of children who will one day recall their parents with the clarity that comes only from the spending of time together. An arrangement entirely possible in a place where time does not mean money.

“I won’t sleep with him.”

“You don’t have to,” says Nick’s wife. “A photogenic kiss with some oomph will be perfecto.The pictures should say ‘We’re off to bed.’”

I think about my mother’s diaries, and how I reread them each night, and imagine with her every word a Havana two decades before. She wrote that José Antonio took me to the beach and taught me to swim on those long-ago Tuesday afternoons when my mother would bring me to him, so that a father could know his child.

“How ’bout it?” asks Nick.

“I won’t sleep with him,” I repeat.

“There’ll be a car waiting for you outside the disco,” says Nick’s wife, impatiently. “Just tell the chuloyou’ve changed your mind. Jump in, and we’ll take you out of the situation.” She looks at my expectantly. “’Ta bien?”

Her willingness to deceive one of her own disturbs me. She reminds me of many people who are newly rich and suddenly loathe the poor and ambitious.

“Cubans are nothing if not great actors,” says Nick’s wife, as if reading my thoughts. “Convincing yumasthey’re desperately in love.”

The complex artistry of conniving vulnerable foreigners into games of love began a decade before. Cuba’s economic lean times were realized in the early 1990s, when Soviet subsidies were cut and food disappeared. The resulting “special period” of barren stores and raging fear provided the biggest economic and social upheaval in thirty years. Cuba had gone from supplying sugar to supplying tourism, and the convergence of a new poverty with an influx of foreigners gave rise to the endemic hustling and prostitution.

Jinetera,the Spanish word for a female jockey, means much more than a señoritaequestrian. It’s a fitting metaphor for what many educated and beautiful Cuban women do after hours to feed their families as well as their dreams.

Jineteras,and their male counterparts, the tourist-swindling jineteros,have become local heroes. Jockeys, cowboys, riders of the beast are heralded by their families as saviors.

With an American embargo punishing all who do business with Cuba, there are no promising signs of prosperity. Humiliations—damning and daily, inflicted by foreigners and police—are not discussed, just swallowed back with a swill of rum or the ubiquitous “relaxation pills” doled out at clinics like aspirin.

I wonder how many years this ridiculous system can continue. Its degradations. Its pride-for-dollars economy.

Tonight, I’m going to perpetuate the humiliation and squeeze into my shortest dress to seduce a young man. If I’m successful, he and his family will lose a lifeline of dollars.

“We’re just protecting his girlfriend’s assets,” offers Nick, as if sensing my discomfort.

I think about this woman, this Norwegian, imagining her cruel manipulations, and also her tender insecurities. I picture her unsexiness, made all the more awkward by the inherent splendor of Cuban women, all of whom are beautiful precisely because they believe it to be so. There’s a great providence in living sheltered from commercialism. For in living protected from the notion of a singular beauty, from a narrow prescription of attractiveness, loveliness may bloom on any stem.

“You in or not?” asks Nick. “We don’t have much time.”

I nod reluctantly. As an American, I’m unaccustomed to ambiguities. I’m waiting for the moral victor to emerge and for the bad guy to show his face. But I don’t know with whom I sympathize more—the Cuban or the foreigner.

Myself a mix between the two, I find consolation only in that I’m doing this to find my father.

That I have no choice.

HE’S MY AGE, with olive eyes and skin as warm and brown and sleek as a river of chocolate. I’m whispering in his ear. I pull him under the kaleidoscope of the disco ball, and throw my hair back. I’m not Alysia tonight. I’m someone else. I’m a girl in a London club in a Miu Miu dress; I’m in Ibiza, and it’s warm and the air is wearing me like a coat and there’s nothing about me that’s a fraud. Music surges through my body, igniting every nerve, and his mouth is the sweet cream of a tres leches.At the end of this dream, when my lips leave his, and I slyly suggest we take it on the road, to my place, baby, and the flashbulbs pop like a jigger in the foreground, I’m happy, I’m in ecstasy, I’m young and alive and he’s all mine tonight.