Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

I’m about to back away when I hear my name yelled, and the voice carries such urgency and tumult that I whirl around. Limón runs toward me, his hand held by a young yumawith orange hair and refrigerator-white skin.

Close behind are two policemen in formal blue, sweating in their uniforms, their eyes locked on Limón. When they reach him, Limón is ballistic, flailing and shouting and scanning for me as he’s dragged back toward the street.

I’m shouting no, please no, and then I’m shouting why, and I’m frozen on the spot, and the Cubans in line behind me are captivated by the theater. Except for the little boy. In his saint’s colors of red and black he’s pointing at the tombstone and looking frightened.

“You’ve turned your back,” he says, his eyes wide.

And he’s right. I’ve turned away from La Milagrosa.

Tears are streaming down the face of the Danish backpacker, the latest victim of Limón’s romantic grift. She doesn’t know why Limón is being arrested, and I don’t have the heart to tell her it’s because he likely reached the third warning in his file—the third encounter with police in the accompaniment of a yuma.Or who knows, I say.

In Havana, things are never as they seem. My own mother told me that.

After we phone Limón’s family, his yumaand I return to the cemetery and look for the possibility of an address of the woman who cooked my mother’s meals so many years ago. I inspect the ground for a slip of paper, hoping Limón had the wits to drop it somewhere for me to find. But on this cold earth, covering the one million dead below it, there’s nothing but dust and, exhausted, I crouch between chunks of aging marble.

I pull my knees into my chest and watch the day fade. In the gloaming, headstones turn opalescent. In the foreground, a line of hopefuls are queued before La Milagrosa—including Limón’s yuma,who’s petitioning for his safe return, her eyes swollen and incarnadine from tears.

Forgive me, La Milagrosa, I whisper. Forgive me for turning my back on you. Forgive us that in this life it is miracles that we must seek, and in seeking miracles, we sometimes destroy our own integrity. Destroy what we consider precious.

Above me is a statue of an angel, a finger held to her lips so she may hear the whisperings of the dead. I sit underneath her, sadly accepting that another link in the mystery of my father’s whereabouts has been severed. Like the angel, I, too, am listening to those buried and pray their secrets will spring forth and change the course of the living.

M ortimer Bardenfeld loveshis super-yacht. No matter the actual location or year outside, inside it’s always the same as the time and place the boat was born: Miami, circa 1985. He pays untold sums to keep the Feadship staffed and running and docked in the world’s great ports. Still, the hot pink drapes have faded to a cool pastel, and the mirrored ceilings in the staterooms have turned orange with rust.

Even the faux pelican ice sculpture has cracked its dainty leg. But Morty doesn’t care, he thinks everything looks beautiful.

Morty, of course, is blind.

Camila is his longtime girlfriend, la mujerin his Havana port, but as she’s gone loopy for the über-rich Syrian, I’ve been nominated to make her excuses and occupy the yachtsman during his week in Havana.

Uncle Morty—he insists his “girls” address him as Uncle—loves Marina Hemingway. It’s Cuba’s prized marina, and one of the only smartly maintained places on the island. Long concrete strips reach like fingers into the sea, providing safe harbor for sailboats and motor yachts, many of them American flagship.

“Ah-lo, gorgeous!” The South African captain slides open the amidships door and gestures grandly for me to enter. With a wink, he points a finger in his boss’s direction.

Uncle Morty moves gracefully about the salon. I can’t help but admire the old guy. Born poor and with a degenerative eye disease, he’d worked his way to Wall Street, trained in mergers and acquisitions, and then spread his tentacles into businesses around the world. His blindness had given him a poker face that terrified competitors and clients alike.

Though Uncle Morty’s money grew exponentially in the nineties, the eighties were his kind of decade, and he pined for them. And if the eighties were his time, Miami had been his place. Miami had reacted to Morty’s egregious crimes with a wink and a shake of the maracas under a festive sun, thanks to a conspiratorial band of lawbreakers and lawmakers. Morty was in the thick of it, the orchestrator of trafficking. He set up webs of offshore corporations, complex tax structures, fake export-imports. Gym bags crammed with dirty cash were cheerfully counted and stashed by bank tellers on Brickell Avenue. Glorious days, he tells me. Lawless days. People getting rich. Very, very rich.

Then the crash. A district attorney under pressure decided to make Morty the first consummate white-collar criminal to be run out of Miami, a dubious distinction in a dubious township. “It was time,” Morty explained. “The streets were paved, and schools were built. A city had been born.” Illegitimacy gave birth to its legitimate heirs. And Morty’s arrest crystallized the moment of transition.

In a quiet deal with the district attorney, Morty traded threats of massive prosecution—crimes that carried hard time—with a promise to never, ever again set foot in Miami-Dade County. Unless he fancied handcuffs. And not the velvet-lined kind, either.

Heartbroken, Morty commissioned a yacht to be designed and built in Miami as homage to his beloved city. Dithy Ramb,technically, is one word, but Morty found two carried more stature, and deemed it thus with a stern face that said no grammar queen was going to fuss him about it.

Dithyramb, traditionally, is a hymn in honor of Bacchus, the Greek god of drink and wine—your typical frat fellow’s main mentor, and Morty’s main muse. If Miami the mistress was leaving him to become Miami the wife, if she was going legit, Morty would carry her 1985 memory, her air and sea and sand, in his pocket with him. A pharaoh’s tomb. One that would ply the seas, preventing nostalgia by keeping the past alive in the hermetically sealed world of expensive plastic.

I fingered the pelican’s fractured femur and sighed.

When launched, the captain told me, she was one of the one hundred biggest luxury boats in American waters. Today, she’s a run-down relic with many more super-yachts stretching well beyond her 126 feet.

“You smell lovely,” Uncle Morty says. “You’ve been touching orchids.”

Kissing his cheek, I flump down on a purple couch while the stew collects drinks. “You’re amazing,” I say, always awed by the precision of his senses.

Uncle Morty and I have spent a few hours alone together every day for a week. There’s been no sex. (“Camila is my true Caribbean lady,” he’d said. “My old nambycane sure misses her.”) Considering Morty’s advanced age, I’m extremely grateful for his sexual loyalty to Camila. Morty and I have, however, been emotionally intimate—far more so than with any of my previous yumas.

Each evening begins with dinner on the aft deck. It’s the best food I’ve had in Cuba, and after the series of gourmet meals and top-shelf wines, I feel a softness return to my body. (Cuba is generally a dieter’s dream, as transportation is scarce, dancing is its pastime, and food, in its banality, is without appeal.) After dinner, Uncle Morty and I converse under the stars until late at night, the thick X-crossed dock lines easing out and gently tugging back in.

Uncle Morty asks me to describe the constellations and, in exchange, he mesmerizes me with passages from his long and decadent life. In our first hours together, he’d pegged me as an American and waited patiently until I was ready to tell my story. I’d spared him no detail of my ten months in Cuba thus far. Tonight is our swan song, and Camila swears he’ll pay me for our weeklong courtship, sexless though it has been.