Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

My hair, when I was a young child, was blonde. She described this in her journals. Alysia’s hair is blonde, but with earthy undertones, like the rich and fertile soil of Cuba itself.

John looks at this hair, this dirty-blonde hair. He looks at this face with its roundness—one that springs enigmatically from two parents with features of distinct sharpness. My mother dismisses this discrepancy, but it’s because she won’t look him in the eye that he further suspects. And when this happens, she feels an infringement upon the hours of freedom in the daytime. She turns every few blocks or so, turns to see who, she fears, is following. But when she looks, she finds no one, and so she blames guilt, she blames the repression of facts, she blames the likelihood of parentage.

She knows her one-year-old daughter is half-Cuban.

Perhaps John knows now, as well.

C umulus clouds rocketthrough the afternoon sky, reaching for the stratosphere, and, failing, give in to gravity’s pull, unleashing a damnation of rain.

Crystals on a chandelier have long been replaced with plastic ice-cream sticks, and they tinkle in the wind, attracting a thin condensation. Drops land on my head as I lie in the space Camila fashioned as a bedroom for her norteamericanaguest. One who’d spent the last night with Morty and was sleeping late.

Outside, on the streets, puddles form and eddies swirl down gently sloped streets, washing away the felled pollution.

Thinking of the babalocha,and how he’d promised my family walks through the puddles left by rain, I soon find myself near my former landlady’s home. It’s there I spend a wistful afternoon watching people. Wondering if each woman who walks by could be an aunt, a cousin, a niece. Or maybe one of the men walking past is José Antonio himself.

Perhaps these folks are my family’s neighbors. Perhaps they are part of the informal exchange among friends. With them, do they, like all clusters of neighbors and friends, swap eggs for lightbulbs, fresh fish for bathtub rum, a screwdriver for scissors?

Breaking my thoughts, a tiny dog struts up and eyes me sweetly. Dogs in Cuba are said to bring good health to the home of their owners, and most are petite and dulcemutts. With a patchwork-quilt coat, this one curls around my feet. He is dirty and collarless, and he licks my toes.

The stores don’t carry commercial dog food. Pooches are fed table scraps or, in lean times, boiled boniato,or sweet potatoes. Protein, in any form, is a humans-only luxury. This diet does little good for sidewalks and parks—not to mention canine longevity—and many bear the ribbed look of an anxious supermodel.

Rubbing his ears, I realize this little one is also unfed, and I peel bits of fruit from my produce sack.

“Whaddya think, fella. Should I just call Victor?” I ask the dog, who cocks his head at me. The mutt plunks his chin down on my feet and sighs.

Victor had made me swear I wouldn’t contact him, but as he doesn’t know my new location, or where to deliver news about my family, I’ve little choice but to risk his anger.

The dog follows me home. I leave him outside Camila’s house with a bowl of rice and beans.

“There’s a boxing match at Kid Chocolate tonight,” I tell Victor on his work line, my voice trembling in anticipation of his wrath. “Middleweights from Santiago. I’ve got tickets, it starts at eight.”

There’s a long pause. “Wrong number,” he says, slamming down the phone.

At eleven o’clock, I’m sitting in the bleachers, my olfactory senses on overload in the fetid arena. It reeks of sweat and the raw garlic the boxers swallow holistically. Two hours, three hours, and still, Victor is nowhere to be seen. My chin slumps into my palm.

Knockout, and spectators shuffle outside. Convinced I’ve lost my connection to Victor, I glumly swing my legs over the bleachers. It’s then I notice a tourist eyeing me. He’s wearing a baseball cap, a “Pork Fat Rules” T-shirt, and tight cutoffs. I’m certain it’s a tourist, as no middle-aged cubanowould be caught dead in shorts. He approaches, but I’m in no mood for working the jinetetonight. Taking a back route through old Havana, I nearly slip on discarded mango skins.

As I make my way deeper into the midnight tenderloin of central Havana, the corner police thin out and then disappear altogether. I’m no longer in tourist territory, but the hefty man follows behind swiftly, his feet sure of his path. It hits me: The man is no tourist.The moon is Havana’s only light source, but my cover is blown, as my white skirt and shirt reflect its luminosity, like the black-light rays in a darkened club.

Ahead, candles flicker in a boisterous room. A party has emptied onto the streets, and I slip inside. In the corner of the small apartment, a Santería pile of dolls and candies and honey-drizzled pumpkin slices nest among candles and herbs. I feel a touch on my arm, and turn to see my pursuer.

“ Coño,what itches you?” he says, wiping his face. He puts his hands on his thighs and catches his breath. “Making me chase you.” I must look scared because he broadcasts a smile. “ Tranquilo,Victor sent me.”

“He’s angry?”

“ Heisn’t, but woman, I’ve never seen anyone walk so fast in my life. Victor said to look for rubiatourist. For a second I thought you were a cubanitaand I’d followed the wrong bollo,but your big-city walk gives you away.”

“Scared the mierdaout of me. How do I know you’re Victor’s friend?”

“ Oye, mami,he paid me twenty dollars to meet you.”

“Right.”

“ Mira,he said you’d reimburse him the twenty.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh, definitely,Victor,” I say, pulling some fula,some fe—faith, the new slang for money—from the interior of my bra and handing it over. Partygoers begin to notice us now, and Victor’s charge pulls me down the street, insisting on walking me home, so as to relay my new address.

“Nice and slow now, mami,” he pleads.

“There’d better be news,” I say, trying to sound tough.

Good news, he says. Victor has found the address where my mother would take me to visit my father and his family.

Good news—no, great news. Life-changing.

Great news until he tells me I must wait another two weeks before Victor feels safe enough to pass it along.

Waiting, and waiting to wait, are the most common forms of torture heaped upon the Cuban population. I must wait because there are things I don’t understand, because nothing is as it seems, because under the patina of a unified revolution is chaos, and so I slip him my new phone number and slip further into the night, waiting because I am Cuban, and that is my burden.

T hreeA .M . inHavana, and all my Russian gangster boyfriend can talk about are his suits.

“Versace is for the small men, for the brodyagas.Me, I forgot Versace in nineteen-ninety—what, five?—you know, when Gianni was shot in Miami. I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine. I heard the news. I go home, I take off Versace, and I say no more suits from him. No more Versace. He was a good man but he is bad luck. Executed in front of his house.” He unleashes a string of Russian curses. “Everyone thought I had bad fashion to drop Versace. But I said you are crazy to wear the clothes of a dead man.”

Our limbs are entangled in the soft cushions of Havana’s hippest cigar lounge. I’m conscious of how my body reclines, and am twisting my torso and legs to their most complimentary, with Sasha’s eyes my lens. I’d rather be back in the U.S., wearing sweats and sitting cross-legged on the couch watching college ball. But Camila is my internal guide, and so I pose.

Sasha is burning his way through a Punch Churchill and the story of his life, a feat fueled by Bolivian marching powder, seven-year Havana Club rum, and the intense interest of his jinetera.