Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

Leonel and Chico are the chief cantineros,and when they’re not polishing the dark wood bar or slipping hard-currency propinasinto their tuxedos, they’re speaking four or five languages with the guests and each other. I’ve never paid for a drink at El Floridita, and I’m not allowed to tip, either, and that’s been the house mandate since my first visit with Aunt June two years before. It’s a wildly generous gesture from the cantineros,as “drinks on the house” rarely translate into Cuban. Whenever I’m in El Floridita, it seems like a modern outpost, an oasis in the barrio,and I’ve marked the place on my map as a favored sanctuary.

El Floridita’s barkeeps have the snappiest job in Havana and are paid far better than engineers or lawyers. Leonel and Chico both hold PhDs in engineering, and practiced their trade for several years before being rewarded with the lusted-after slots as rum pullers. Hotel maids, tour guides, and taxi drivers are, in fact, the best-paid legal professions in the country. Many who hold them consider themselves lucky, and have typically given up previous careers in accounting, management, and dentistry.

I’m hoping Leonel and Chico are the kind of good souls I’m shortly to inherit, if I ever find my Cuban family. I’m answering the bartenders’ questions about the search for my father as Richard and Daya show up for dinner. We’ve barely exchanged greetings when I feel a mouth brush against my ear.

“Muchacha,”whispers Rafael, “two million people in Havana and I’m always running into this one.”

He’s with two women in their early forties, probably English and certainly very drunk. They pull him away from me, out of the bar, and Daya gestures from the crowded dining room.

“Don’t think you’re getting out of me making dinner for you,” Rafael says, walking backward and sporting a cocky grin.

I smile despite myself and take a seat at the table. Richard and Daya avoid their usual pantomime and speak only to me—one in English and the other in Spanish.

“Dahling, please tell Daya her table manners are atrocious, and I’d like you to give a dining lesson,” says Richard, leaning back in his chair.

“I’ll show her at home,” I say, confounded. Her table manners seem fine for a country girl suddenly thrust into a life of luxurious restaurants and nightclubs.

“Now,” he instructs. “Show her now. She eats like she was born in a barn.”

When I translate for Daya into Spanish, she ingests her thumb and looks away.

“Isn’t that adorable,” says Richard, beaming. Then he gestures toward her table setting and instructs me again to teach her properly.

“You tell him I’m not doing anything more until he gives my mother the money she wants,” says Daya, her dark eyes flashing in anger.

“She says she’ll be happy to learn but she’s a bit tired now,” I say to Richard. And then, to Daya, I ask: “Your mom is pressuring for money? I thought she was going to leave you alone about it.”

“What about what I want?” asks Daya. “There’s more to love than—” She picks up the lobster in butter sauce by the tail and waves it around. “Or this—” She pulls at her backless crepe dress. “If I’m going to mamarhis pingathree times a day, I think he should give money for my whole family. I don’t care about lobster or fancy restaurants or mojitos. Mira,I want him to help my mother.” Now she speaks directly to Richard, loudly, as if his problem were volume and not fluency. “We need a wash machine! We need new plumbing!” Then she turns to me. “I won’t eat any more twenty-five-dollar lobsters. What does he think, I can sell my shit?”

“Oh, Lord,” grumbles Richard as the customers begin to stare at our threesome. “Do translate, I should know what I’m dealing with.”

“Daya, you don’t have to sleep with him, you’ll get by without his money,” I say, ignoring Richard.

“ Ay,Alysia, mi vida,how many times do I have to say you will neverunderstand?”

Richard pulls me back into the conversation with a tug on my forearm. “While we’re on the subject of improvements,” he says, “I’d like to talk about why it’s I that must always initiate sex. Could I have an explanation? Also, do clarify, is it possible to have one’s menstruation twenty-three straight days? Or would that require hospitalization?”

Before I can translate, Daya interrupts. “He calls my mother a vulture! Every time I say dinero, por favor,he says, what for, for la tiñosa?” Then, to Richard, she yells: “Now he calls me the little vulture. La tiñosita, la tiñosita,that’s all I hear. It’s not funny!”

A jovial Richard interrupts. “It would be more pleasant, really, if I didn’t have to practically beg for my pleasures—”

“What did he say?”

“What did she say?”

But neither await my translation.

“What I want to know,” says Daya, “is if he’s going to marry me or not. I need to know right now.” She punctuates by banging her fork and knife on the table. “I want. To go. To England.”

“No, dahling, that’s not exactly an improvement in holding your utensils,” cracks Richard. “Now you’re chucking a strop.”

“ENGLAND!” shouts Daya.

“Ah, England. That’s a word I understand,” Richard says to me. “Tell me, do I have ‘imbecile’ written on my face? She doesn’t want to be with me in Cuba, imagine she’ll want to in England, where she’s free?”

“ENGLAND!” shouts Daya again. “Boda.”Wedding. She hums the bridal theme.

“My wife in London wouldn’t be so amused,” he says, laughing.

I relay this information to Daya, wondering how on earth I found myself in this situation.

“Your wife?” It may be the only English word Daya understands, and her eyes flare. Cubanosare the most jealous folk in the world, and it’s an attribute I find irritating and puerile. I’ve refused to include it in my own cubanidad,but Limón tells me I’m not truly native unless I can muster celosíawhen my love interest is threatened. Daya, however, proves her bloodline.

“He has a wife?” she asks, seething. The waiter cautiously sets down our desserts, three flans framed by whipped cream and soupy caramel sauce. Daya looks at her plate a moment and demurs.

“Tell Richard I’m ready for my table manners lesson now.”

“Twenty-three straight days, imagine. Does she appear anemic to you?”

Shock cuts me off midtranslation. For Daya picks up the plate of flan, lifts it above her head, and slowly tilts the ceramic. Sauce dribbles down her face and into the crevices of her designer dress. Lifting her chin, she accepts the juices and the creaminess until the flan is all but down her throat.

My hand is on my forehead. Chico from the bar is wiping glasses and shaking his head with a smirk. Richard takes a long, cool drag of his cigarette before turning to me.

“Well, translator,” he says, a slow grin spreading across his face. “Suppose you’re going to tell me that this is Spanish for ‘Where’s my high chair?’”

D eep in thenight, a hand covers my mouth. I wake up with a man on top of me. It’s Limón, and his eyes are wild. I sit up and hit him hard, on the arm.

“C’mon,” he says. “I need to crash here tonight.”

“What’s wrongwith you?”

“Look, I’ve been busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest,” says Limón, coolly reciting one of my grandfather’s sayings. He lights up a hand-rolled cigarette.

“How’d you get in here?”

“I get in anywhere.”

“My landlady will kill you first, then me,” I say, pulling on jeans and shooting an anxious glance toward the door. “What have you been busy with anyhow?”