Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

I climb into the car, feeling shattered. I watch his confused face through the rear window, one glued on with duct tape. He’s young, I tell myself. He’ll find another yuma.

I take a swill of the driver’s bathtub rum, in case he doesn’t.

The car stops short of my home, and I stumble through potholes on my way to the concrete couch, the Malecón. It’s near dawn. The transvestites are asleep, and I sit nearby, watching the sun pull from the clouds, and letting the humid sea—tumultuous today—wash over me completely.

N ick strolls thelobby of the five-star Parque Central hotel with the gait of a VIP on a royal tour. In hushed tones and the gravitas normally reserved for national diplomacy, he gives the bad news to clients—more than a few of whom go ahead with the wedding anyway.

Nick signals for me to wait at the hotel’s rooftop pool in the sky. There, under the brutality of an August sun, I settle into a green chaise and get to work. My mother’s journal of her life in 1970s Havana is spread before me. Like any journal, it’s sometimes insightful and occasionally scintillating and often dull. It’s painful to read of the details of her mundane life as the wife of a diplomat, or of John’s inability to show affection, to relax, or to be spontaneous and loving.

I feel shameful, prying into her innermost thoughts, but it’s the price I pay in searching for clues of my father. I console myself with the notion that most journal keepers harbor, on some level, the desire to be read.

But if my mother ever considered that her daughter would one day be reading her words and tracking her steps, she surely would have included clearer information. On each read, I’m hoping the letters in every word have rearranged themselves and formed an address—one where she lived, or my biological father lived, or both.

I’m tugging at my bikini top when the stranger sits next to me and orders a Cuba libre.

“American Coke and Cuban rum,” he muses in a British accent. “Volatile combination, don’t you agree? Likely to combust in one’s stomach.”

I flip onto my back.

“Richard,” he says, offering his hand. “Of London. Are you here long?”

“Alysia,” I say. “Of Cuba and America—”

“Sorry,” he laughs. “Don’t need to order a Cuba libre. One right here.”

Instantly I like him, and offer my hand in return. “I’m staying on a year. Student visa.”

“Your Spanish is good, I presume.”

“Don’t understand half the slang, but I manage.”

His drink arrives, and he orders one for me. “There’s the matter of a Cuban girlfriend,” he says. “We’re not getting on, and the translator I’ve hired, he’s a real wanker. Would you mind terribly?” Grateful for any work, I agree and make the arrangements to meet the lovebirds for dinner.

Richard leaves as Nick shows up, scratching his burnsides.

“Good news,” says my employer, settling into a chaise and pulling out a map. His magnifying glass glides over Miramar, the streets colored in brilliant yellows and reds and blues. He punches in coordinates on his handheld (and illegal) GPS, then scrawls a large box on the map. Somewhere within his crude boundaries sits the home John shared with my mother twenty years before, and possible clues to José Antonio’s address. The parameters, wide and general as they are, make me happier than I’ve been in days.

Nick picks up a new stack of papers and promises to read through notes culled from my mother’s diaries. Her throwaway phrases—“a two-minute walk to the beach” or “the figure-eight pool next door”—have crystallized into geographic gems.

“Tomorrow, I’ll have your mother’s address locked up,” he boasts. “But I’m expecting you to take care of tonight’s chulo.”

“The last chulodidn’t fall for me.”

“Like you tried.”

“I tried!” I say defensively.

“In flip-flops and a baggy shirt, you did,” he scolds. Not to mention the greasy ponytail, I say to myself.

“Do I have a choice?”

“ Thisone’s tough; a lifeguard I’ve been after for nearly a year. Name’s Rafael. He’s got more yumasthan coconuts.”

“Where and when,” I say with a sigh.

“Club Las Vegas, midnight.” Nick pulls down his sunglasses. “Upfront and honest,” he says. “You don’t get him, our little arrangement is over.”

I ’m determined tobag my chulotonight.

I’m twirling in Camila’s nude, sheer Marc Jacobs dress I nicknamed the bomba—because every time she wears it men drop dead.

The neighbors are buzzing about the night’s task. Everyone seems to know a different Rafael with “more yumasthan coconuts” and I’m saturated with seduction tips like a virgin bride on her wedding night.

In Camila’s teeming front room, the neighbors look me over. Opinions bellow simultaneously: The dress is too baggy. It’s too long. It’s rotten against my complexion.

“Only one way to test,” says Camila, pushing me out her front door. I walk hesitantly along the busy sidewalk, looking back at the group of people gathering to watch.

“ Oye!Loosen your hips!” shouts one of the neighbors.

“ Por favor!Slow down!” shouts another.

“And movimiento sexy!”

Several men pass without looking at all. In a country where street flirtation has been elevated to an art form, I’m downright mortified by the lack of attention. I loosen my body. My toes start to point and I sway my buttocks.

With Camila’s giggling neighbors behind me, I remember my mother writing that the streets of Havana unlocked in her a sensuality she believed long dead. Suddenly, I feel my mother’s presence—the way she always appears, a slight depression on my forearm, a shift in the wind—and my body surges. It’s a granting of permission to release the cubanainside. I take a deep breath, throw my shoulders back, and smile a bit more confidently.

A creaky old man with a cane hobbles by. “I’d pay a dollar for a bit of that!” he shouts.

Considering the economy, I take it as a compliment.

N atchez, Mississippi, atone time, claimed more millionaires than any other town outside New York City. Despite its comforts, my mother’s low threshold for boredom, coupled with her heightened sense of adventure, had her aching to leave long before the end of her high school days.

She believed that growing up on the banks of the Mississippi, for a girl like her, was an inexorable torture, for the river itself traveled freely by and into the wilder parts of the world.

Parts she dreamed of seeing.

It was 1957 when she first saw the boys from Latin America. They’d arrived at the station carrying trunks plastered with exotic port stickers, and wearing linen suits and felt hats. The young students were whisked off to Jefferson College, a nearby private military school newly fashionable with privileged families in Bogotá and Mexico City and Tegucigalpa.

It was only then that Natchez appealed to her imagination.

She remembered clearly a Saturday afternoon when she was sixteen. She and her girlfriends—in starched petticoats and silk scarves—met at Mr. Paul’s pharmacy on Main Street for their customary cherry colas. There, at the long Formica bar, on the weekend before a big dance, the town girls gathered on one end, and the town boys at the other, all awaiting a surge of courage.

When the Latinos first sauntered through the pharmacy doors that Saturday afternoon, clad in gray-and-blue military finery, my mother held her breath. Unlike the Southern boys in their trepidation, the Latinos waltzed right up to her and the other girls and invited them to the dance. Their cheekiness sparked a years-long feud between the locals and their foreign counterparts.