Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

“They arrested my aunt,” he says.

“Arrested?” I can barely speak. “ Dios mío.For what?”

“For being a librarian,” he says, his eyes flashing anger. I stare at him. She runs an independent library, with antigovernment books. I’d forgotten. What he doesn’t say is that his aunt may have been paid by anti-Castro groups in the U.S. to foster rebellion.

Limón exhales out the window onto a warm breeze carrying the unmistakable scent of the world’s most heady tobacco. He hooks my arm. “I was fleteandothe streets with a yuma,and the police ordered us to stop. Me and the yumaran like hell straight here.”

“Great! Fucking great, cabroncito,” I say, flicking him on the head. “I’m not in this house legally, and you knowI can’t get in trouble. They kick me out of this country and I’ve lost my chance to find my father.”

“ Ay, monita,that’s why I’m here. A woman I met near your parents’ old house in Miramar called me.”

“Who? What’d she say—”

“Tranquilo, loquita,” he says, fumbling for a scrap of paper in his pants. He reads from it. “She says she remembered a woman who might’ve worked in your mother’s house.”

I can’t speak. I reach over and bear-hug Limón. Finally, some information gleaned independently of Victor. If it comes through, it’s the best lead yet.

Limón continues. “Did you go there last week, with a cubano?” I nod, telling him about Rafael. Limón thinks a moment.

“Did the G-2 man follow?”

“Not sure,” I say. “Don’t think so.”

“You’re not coming with me,” he says as I protest. “Whatever I find, I’ll come right back here with it. Perhaps we shouldn’t be seen together.”

I feel as if I’m a perpetual teenager in Cuba, that we’re all perpetual teenagers, the children of an overly strict father, one dodgy and out of touch and not sensible in his dealings. People here are forever sneaking around, forever on the sly. I’d never known what it was like to lose my freedoms, even while my parents served in other countries when I was a child. It never occurred to me what tight controls would feel like in everyday life.

Havana, a breezy city full of liveliness and music, fights the drab atmosphere the government attempts to impose on the sensuous city, as if it were Pyongyang and not a tropical port. The constant insistence that war is imminent is meant to keep Cubans in line and temper the merriment. But rather than sculpting a believable sense of danger, the affected intimidation, at least for me, comes off as Monty Python slapstick. Officials with stiff, blow-dried hair and freshly ironed fatigues walk sternly among joking, bright Cubans in sparkly cosmetics and Lycra, their eyes twinkling.

Just when I’m about to agree Limón should scout the contact alone, a middle-aged Mediterranean man in moss-colored linen pulls himself onto my windowsill and swings his long legs over the ledge and into my tiny room. Limón turns his back as the effeminate yumafires up a menthol cigarette.

“You can’t imagine how uncomfortable it is out there,” he says, brushing imaginary fluff from his shirt. “You don’t mind if I step in a bit?” He points to Limón. “He loves to keep me his big, bad, dark secret.”

Limón won’t meet my eyes.

“Alysia,” I say, introducing myself, and kissing each cheek. “Sorry, didn’t know you were out there on the ledge. How long have you…How long have you and Limón known each other?”

“I’ve been coming back to Cuba for Limón for—what, baby—two, three years now?” he says, smiling. The yumais amusing and, under different circumstances, I’d say I liked him immediately. But not with the police looking for the couple.

When the door knocks, my heart sinks, like that of a young girl caught with a boy in her room, and even though I’m grateful it’s just the landlady, her furious rant sends Limón and his lover seeking a quick exit. I don’t want to upset Limón, as I know he’s going to retrieve information about someone who’d worked for my mother.

I follow them, wanting to tell Limón it’s okay, that I understand, that although he’s not homosexual—or even if he is—I know what he’s doing is for money because I do it as well.

But he leaves the house without looking back at me once, his enamored yumatraipsing after him like a pet Maltese. Not even the yuma’s conviviality can put out the volcano that has erupted in the center of my landlady, who is tapping two fingers on her skin, a silent damnation of Limón’s dark skin color, and scolding me, asking how dare I bring a chardoto her house. Racism is not supposed to exist in Cuba, it’s alleged to have had been eradicated. But we both know the truth, that black people here, like in most places, are treated with extreme prejudice.

A t first, Ithought you were a tortillera.” A lesbian. “Because you don’t wear earrings.” Rafael tugs at his own naked lobes.

“A lesbian,” I say, shaking my head. “Four-inch heels, tight dresses, gold chains all over, and you think I look like a lesbian because my ears are bare?”

“A woman with no earrings means she loves women.”

“Ridiculous macho mierda.”

Rafael laughs. “Eso es Cuba!”

“Speaking of women,” I say, cautiously bringing up the subject. “Your girlfriend Modesta doesn’t like me much.”

Rafael smirks. “She’s not my girlfriend. We used to be marinovios,” he says, using a word indicating a couple who lives together. “But she’s nuts, really loca,has it out for all foreigners. You should stay away from her.”

“Modesta said the same thing to me about you.”

Before he can reply, a commotion of exclamations and whistles emits from his living room.

Under a ceiling of stars, we’d been lounging on the patio of his apartment overlooking ocean waves we can hear better than see. After several of his offers to make me dinner during past months, I’ve relented, and met Rafael at his home. After the first course, however, we’d been interrupted by neighbors waving a home video. The tape was shot by a Cuban professor who’d experienced a rare trip abroad, to San Francisco. Rafael had the only VHS on the block, and so they gathered in front of his TV.

But it wasn’t the Golden Gate Bridge captivating the audience. It was a grocery store. They huddled over the set, transfixed like cavemen at a campfire, as the cameraman grazed the aisles of a California supermarket, scanning from top to bottom, lingering on fourteen types of mustard. Dozens of eggs, explained the mesmerized narrator, in brown and white and organized in sizes small to jumbo. Milk in several percentages of fat. Sugar in artificial and cane, raw and refined, confectioner’s and superfine.

I’ve rarely seen so rapt an audience, and the multitudinous plenty of my country shames me. I slink back to the patio and seek out my favorite constellation, Orion’s Belt, the one my mother taught me to look for whether we were in northern Africa, in Europe, or back home. It’s under the same Orion’s Belt, I think, that people both scramble through the day and drive their SUVs six blocks to the gym. The same Orion’s Belt that shines down on my lost family.

Rafael brings us rum. “Camila says you only have three months or so before your year is up in Cuba.” I nod. “How’s the search for your father?”

My smile suggests all’s well, but in reality I’m filled with longing, and fighting off irritation with the Cuban bureaucracy that hinders the netting of intelligence. While I wait for Victor, I imagine that each man in his midfifties walking the sidewalks could be José Antonio. Anyone who could meet his description is studied as I search faces for hints of my own features. It’s driving me crazy.